Close photo of a small black fine line arrow tattoo on the back of a hand, with a floral quilted bedspread behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on the hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow with a thin shaft and a feathered fletching is tattooed on the back of a hand, angled diagonally towards the wrist. The linework is delicate and mostly black, with light grey shading on the shaft and tips. The hand rests on a cream quilted bedspread printed with pink roses, and beaded bracelets are visible at the wrist.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The bosun has finally let me have the chart room lamp after dark, so I am writing this with the ink pot wedged between two charts of the Cape run. You will laugh, but I have been thinking about your arrow, the one you scratched on the shed door the summer before I left, pointing at the cherry tree. You said it meant the way home. I thought it was daft then. Out here, with nothing but grey water to the horizon for nineteen days, I find I half believe you.

Last Tuesday the second mate, Harrow, lost his compass card in a squall and swore the thing had jumped its pin on purpose. We steered by the wake and the swell for two days after that, the sky too thick for stars. On the third morning a single gull came down out of the murk and settled on the spanker boom, and it would not be shifted. Cook said it was a sign of land. Harrow said it was only hungry. I watched it turn its head and fix on a point off the bow, straight as a shot, and I sighted down the rail the way you showed me with the chalk.

We raised the headland at dusk, close enough to smell the heather on the wind. I did not tell anyone about the gull, though it left a feather on the rail, grey and barred and tipped with black. I have folded it in with this letter. Keep it on the shed door if you like, pointing at the cherry tree. Harrow would only say a bird cannot read a sextant.

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