Black blackwork tattoo of three ornate arrows with beaded shafts on the inner forearm, with two black zigzag bands circling the arm above them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows and zigzag bands on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three ornate arrows run diagonally down the forearm, each with a feathered or leaf-shaped head, beaded shaft and decorative fletching. Two black zigzag bands encircle the arm above the arrows. The work uses bold solid black linework with small filled dots and little or no grey shading, against a plain pale skin tone and dark background.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Arrow Zigzag Band Bead Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Corran fetched the arrows out of the reeds below Hobb's Weir the morning after the flood, and she counted them twice before she carried them up to the lock cottage. Three arrows, each with a leaf-shaped head, one feathered like a fern, one with a head cut like a notched spade. Her father had made them for the boat called the Patience, and the Patience had gone under the lock gate in March with nobody aboard.

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The bargefolk said a sunk boat could only be raised by a shot from the bank, and that the arrow must be loosed by someone the water did not know. Mabel had never been in the river above her knees. She strung the longest bow in the cottage, wound a strip of tow-rope round her left wrist in zigzags to hold the grip, and walked out along the towpath to the place where the river bent back on itself.

The first arrow fell short and drifted into the willows. The second struck the bank and split its fletching. She stood with the third, its beads knocking together on the shaft, and thought of how her father used to lay his hand over hers to steady the draw. The wind dropped. She loosed it low over the water, and it skipped once, twice, and sank into the mud at the edge of the weir pool, the way a stone goes when it has been thrown by somebody who means it.

By evening the Patience came up slowly, stern first, with weed hanging from her rudder like wet hair. Mabel hung the three arrows on the cottage nail and left the rope on her wrist, because it was the only thing of her own she had tied tight enough to hold.