Black ink tattoo of three arrows crossing diagonally over dotted geometric lines on the inner upper arm, in black and grey.

Three arrows with geometric dotted lines

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three arrows cross diagonally across the arm, the central one longest, each with hatched fletching and diamond-shaped arrowheads. Thin dotted lines form intersecting triangles and a diamond behind and around the arrows. The work is in black ink only, with fine hatching on the feathers and solid fill on the shafts, set against pale skin and a dark background.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Arrow Geometric line Diamond Dotted line Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edwin had been counting the dots on the chalk line since Lauds, and the number kept changing. Forty-one, then thirty-eight, then forty-one again, because the wind off the moor lifted the dust and the dust settled where it pleased. Abbot Hubert stood in the cloister arcade with his hands folded in his sleeves, watching the boy work as though the stones themselves might object.

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The plan was simple enough on vellum. Three arrows, shot from the north door at dawn on the feast of St Lucy, would strike the wall at three marks, and the triangles drawn between those marks would show where the new sundial's gnomon must sit so the light reached the refectory bench by Vespers. Edwin had drawn the diamond himself, the figure that held the other lines together, and he had been proud of its symmetry until the first arrow struck the mortar a hand's width wide.

The second arrow had found the stone clean. The third had skidded off a bracket of ivy and dropped into the nettles by the well, and it was there that Hubert went, parting the nettles with his staff. He came back holding the shaft by its striped fletching and turned it over in the grey light.

"You drew the dots too close together," he said. "The light will not wait for them to be neat."

Edwin looked at the chalk, the three triangles overlapping like the strings of a lute, and understood that the diamond had been the only honest line he had drawn all week. He took the arrow back, measured the shadow it threw across the flagstones at the hour of Prime, and marked where it fell. It was a hand's width from the old mark, and the bench beneath it was warm before the sun had cleared the wall.