Fine line tattoo of three crossed arrows on the upper arm, drawn in black ink with small shaded arrowheads and feathered fletching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three crossed arrows on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo of three arrows crossed at their shafts, with the arrowheads pointing down and the fletching at the top. The linework is thin and even, with light shading inside the fletching and arrowheads. The design is in black ink on pale skin and sits centred on the upper arm against a plain, softly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad sold the archery stall to a man from Wrexham the week the big top went up on Parsonage Green, but he never sold the three arrows. They hung on a nail behind the tin cups, shafts crossed like the hands of a clock stopped at quarter past, their heads pointing at the mud.

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Nobody on the fair could hit the bullseye with all three. Dad said it was a trick of the wrist, that you had to let go together or not at all. I was eleven and thought it was nonsense until the Thursday the wind got into the canvas and the guy ropes started to sing, and a lad from the ghost train dared me to try.

I threw. Two arrows went wide into the hay bales and the third caught the rim of the target and shivered there, its feathers bent back like a startled bird. The lad from the ghost train whistled. Dad didn't look up from counting coins. He just said that's the one you keep, pulled it free and pressed it into my palm, still warm from the wood.

We left Parsonage Green before dawn. Years later I found the arrows in a biscuit tin with the ticket stubs and the rain-spotted programmes, and I understood he had never been talking about the wrist. The tin sits on my shelf now, and the one arrow I kept still points its head at the floor, as if waiting for the ground to tell it where to land.

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