Small black arrow tattoo running along the side of a finger on a hand forming a loose circle, with gold rings and a bracelet visible.

Small arrow tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple arrow is tattooed in solid black ink along the side of an extended finger, with the shaft running diagonally and the head pointing up and to the right. The linework is clean and thin, with no shading, and the tattoo sits against warm skin in a close, warmly toned photograph. The hand is raised against a textured, pale grey and white background, with gold rings and a bracelet also in view.

Fine line Hand Arrow Finger Hand Ring Bracelet

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Ilse, the corridor lights on Deck Nine went amber again this morning, so I walked the long way to the seed vault and counted arrows. There are four hundred and twelve painted on the bulkheads now, each one a plain black shaft with a barbed head, each one pointing the way the ship is travelling. Mother's old stencil has worn thin at the edges, so I have been cutting new ones from the spare sheet and going over the old lines with a brush no thicker than a hair.

Keep reading

Yesterday a boy from the nursery found me kneeling by the junction at Spoke Four. He asked why the arrows never point back. I told him nobody aboard has ever seen the place we came from, so there is nothing behind us worth pointing at. He thought about this for a long while, then asked whether we would know when we arrived, because the paint would have to be scraped off and the arrows drawn over. I said the captain would tell us. He said the captain had slept through most of his own life, which is true, and I had no answer for that.

So I have decided to make one more, and not on a wall. It goes on the inside of the observation hatch, low enough that the children can press their faces to the glass and see it before they see anything else. It points at the stars ahead, the only things out there that have ever shifted position for us, and it is the only arrow on the ship with its shaft running at a slant, as if it had somewhere urgent to be.

I finished it at midnight. The head is sharp enough that I nearly cut my thumb testing it, and when I stood back it looked smaller than the others, lonelier, which I think is right for something that has to do all its telling alone. Write soon, and tell the mould in the greenhouse I have not forgotten it. Yours, Tomas