Close view of a tiny red and black arrow tattoo with star details on the inner upper arm, in fine line style, with a colourful sleeve on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A small arrow with a red shaft and black tips sits beside a tiny black star-like mark on the inner upper arm. The linework is thin and simple, with solid red fill on the shaft and no visible shading. A hand holds the arm against a rooftop backdrop, and a colourful traditional-style tattoo is partly visible on the forearm.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dough doesn't care what time it is, so at half three Alf and I are already elbow deep in the flour bins when the first van pulls up outside on Hallam Street. Nobody in Leeds is awake to see us except the milk float and the gulls, and we like it that way. My sister Nadia messages me at this hour asking if I've slept, and I tell her the bread has.

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Every morning the sourdough goes onto the cooling rack with a little card tag, a red shaft and black fletching I cut out with the pinking shears, pointing to whichever loaf came out of the oven first. Alf calls it the finger of God. I call it the only honest instruction in the building, because nobody argues with an arrow and nobody reads a sign twice before six. Last winter a man from the council came in to tell us our hand-lettered signs were a fire risk, and he left with a rye and a tag pointing straight at the door.

The trouble started in March, when the cards began going missing. Alf swore it was the cat from the flats across the yard, but I found the stack in the pocket of my old coat, each one with a tiny black star pricked beside the arrowhead in the same tired pencil. Someone had been up before me, or else I had been sleepwalking through my own kitchen. I never asked Alf which of us it was, and he never asked me.

By six the sky over the chimneys goes the colour of weak tea, and the rooftop above the bakery fills with pigeons waiting for the crusts. I take the last card from the drawer, draw one arrow and one small star beside it, and pin it to the rack for nobody in particular. Somebody always reads it.