Close view of a small black fine line tattoo of a dotted arrow curving across the side ribs, with a person lifting their striped top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small dotted arrow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a dotted line with an arrowhead at one end and a double chevron at the other sits on the side of the torso. The linework is thin and crisp, with the dotted stroke built from separate small marks. The image is in natural colour with a soft, neutral background and a striped top pulled up beside the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Dotted line Chevron

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, before the soup goes cold. You want the story of the dotted line? Mind the sugar bowl, then, because my father drew that line with it. He kept the chart of the coast pinned above the sideboard in this very room, and every winter he'd take a pencil to it. A dot every half mile, running out from the harbour wall, and at the far end a small sharp arrow, pointing past the edge of the paper where the sea stopped being measured and started being hope.

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He meant to sail it. He had a cutter called the Marjorie Ann lying on the mud at Staithes, and a plan to take her south with my uncle Joe, who could read the weather by the smell of the wind. The chevrons at the other end were his idea of the gulls that would follow them out, two wings folded back like men tipping their caps at a funeral. Every spring the dots got bolder, and every spring the Marjorie Ann sprang another leak and the money went on the roof instead.

He never went. Joe died first, in a bad January, and the cutter was broken up for firewood the year after. But every morning until his knees gave out, my father walked to the end of the pier and traced that route in the air with one finger, dot by dot, the way you'd trace a name on a headstone.

When we cleared his things I found the chart folded inside the family Bible. Beside the last dot someone had written in pencil, in a hand gone wobbly with age, 'Next summer.' I tell the boarders that the line is unfinished. That's not quite right. It was finished the moment he drew it, and it has been pointing at the same thing ever since.