Three-panel photo of a fine line tattoo series reading 1 of 3, 2 of 3 and 3 of 3 with arrows, shown on a forearm and the upper back.

Three-part arrow tattoo on forearm and upper back

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows three photographs of a black ink tattoo series. The first two panels show script numbering reading 1 of 3 and 2 of 3 on a forearm, with horizontal lines and arrows, while the bottom panel shows 3 of 3 above a single arrow on the upper back. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or colour, and the three images are arranged in a grid.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Back Arrow Line Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third telegram was the only one Ruth Ackroyd never got to read. It came up the Calder valley in the satchel of a boy on a bicycle, folded twice, the corner marked in the same pencil as the first two. She had kept them in a biscuit tin under the counter at the post office in Thornbeck Stead, one above the other, and when the boy handed it over she was reaching for the tin before she had thought about it.

Keep reading

The first had come in March, addressed to nobody, with only the words Keep the line straight and a small arrow pointing east toward the reservoir road. The second arrived in April with two arrows, both pointing the same way, and a note saying the walls were up at Bellmoor. Ruth knew the hand. It belonged to Teddy Lowe, a surveyor who had walked the moor with a chain and a theodolite and had not come back down the road since the spring.

The third she opened on the counter while the postmaster's wife watched over her spectacles. It held one arrow drawn with a ruler and nothing else, pointing up the hill past the last wall, where the old drovers' path ran out into bracken. Ruth put her coat on and followed it. Halfway up she found a stake in the peat with a strip of red cloth knotted to it, and beyond that a line of pale stones laid end to end, as straight as anything Teddy had ever measured.

At the top, under a hawthorn, sat a tin box with its lid pressed shut by a thumb. Inside were three sheets of paper, each numbered in his careful script, and a fourth telegram that had never been sent. It read: You were always the one who finished the line. Ruth folded it into her pocket and walked back down the way she had come, following arrows she had not yet noticed were all pointing home.