Small black hand-drawn tattoo of arrows, a cross and an arc on the inside of a wrist, photographed with the palm facing up.

Small arrows and cross symbols on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo sits on the inner wrist and is made up of five simple symbols in a row: a downward arrow, a cross, an arc, an upward arrow and a downward arrow. The linework is even and dark with no shading, and the lines look slightly uneven, as if drawn by hand. The ink is set against pale skin and the photo is taken from above with the hand raised.

Forearm Arrow Cross Arc Symbol

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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

Now sit down, you lot, and mind the gull on the bench, he's had his eye on your crisps. You want the tale of the wall at Gullhaven, and you'll have it the way my gran gave it to me, out loud and not from a book.

Keep reading

Every morning before the first boat put out, Old Ada Trewin walked the harbour wall with a tin of white chalk and a rag. She drew the same five marks on the stones beside the slipway. A finger pointing down for the ebb. A cross for the Sisters, the three rocks that take a hull like a bite. An arc for the sandbar that rises and falls with the moon. Then a finger up for the flood, and last, another finger down, which meant wait at the mouth until the bell rang. Stay, that last mark meant. Ada never once said the word out loud. She reckoned the sea heard enough talk.

One January the marks were gone in the night. Someone had scrubbed the stones with a wire brush, and Ada's boy Tam, nine years old and with no sense of danger, was out past the Sisters in his uncle's dinghy, chasing a lost lobster pot. Ada went down the wall in her slippers with the chalk. She didn't draw the whole sequence. She drew only the last mark, the downward arrow, big as a door, and stood on it shouting his name until the fog thinned and a small orange sail turned, slow as a thought, and came home along the arc.

So that's the wall. Those marks are still there under the paint, if you know where to look. It was never a fancy bit of carving. It was an instruction, and it has stayed put.