Black and white photo of a raised hand showing a small fine line arrow tattoo on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand held in a loose fist with the inner wrist turned towards the camera. A small arrow with a straight shaft and a split arrowhead sits on the wrist, drawn in thin, dark linework with no shading. The plain dark background makes the fine black ink stand out against the pale skin.

Fine line Forearm Arrow

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster's boy has already run off with the second-class tickets by the time you reach the platform at Hollin Bridge, so you stand under the canopy with your mother's carpet bag and watch the rain bead on the iron rail. Nobody told you the train from Leeds would be late. Nobody told you about the archery butts behind the church either, where Mr Okey's sons have been loosing shafts at a straw man since Whitsun, and where, on the Thursday before you left, you put your first arrow through the hay bale and felt the whole field go quiet.

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Your father made the bows. He cut the yew himself and kept the staves in the cellar, wrapped in sacking, the way other men keep their Sunday suits. He used to say the trick was not the pull but the release, that the arrow only goes where the hand has already decided. You did not believe him until the cellar flooded in March and the staves swelled and split, and you had to watch him stand there with his trousers rolled to the knee, holding a warped length of wood like a lost child.

The letter came with the second post on a Tuesday. It was short. The Ministry had no further need of his services at the depot, and the rent on the cottage was due by the quarter. You read it twice at the kitchen table, then folded it into the shape of a paper arrowhead, the way you used to with the Beano, and pushed it under the teapot.

On the train you will sit by the window and draw the same mark over and over on the back of a ticket: one straight line, two barbs splayed like a bird in flight. By Doncaster the pencil is worn to nothing. You keep drawing anyway.