Black fine line tattoo of an arrow made from small triangles running along the inner forearm, shown with a knitted jumper pushed up to the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Triangle arrow tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of an arrow runs down the inner forearm, with a thin shaft and a head built from stacked, outlined and solid triangles. The linework is fine and even, with small triangles forming the fletching and tip. The photo is taken in soft natural light, with the arm angled diagonally across the frame against a dark and pale knitted jumper and pale denim.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Triangle Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The arrow was lying across the thwart when Mabry Tull came up from the hold, its shaft dry and its head still sharp enough to take the skin off a thumb. Nobody aboard the Hesper had shot it. The crew were herring men from Lowstoft who carried no bows, and the only archer they had ever known, old Ruth Pell, had been put ashore at Skerrow with a broken hip and a worse temper. Nine days out, with the water gone grey and the sky sitting low on the masts, the arrow was the only thing on the boat that seemed to know where it was going.

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The head was built of small triangles, one stacked on another, the top ones hollow and the bottom ones filled in black. Three more triangles made the fletching, and all of them pointed forward toward the bow, though the wind was behind them and had been for two days. Mabry's father had taught her to read a chart before she could read a letter, and she laid the arrow on the chart the way you would lay a ruler. It pointed south-west, past the edge of anything drawn. The captain swore and wanted it thrown over, but the men who tried to lift it found it heavier than it looked.

Each morning one of the fletching triangles had come away, until on the seventh day only the head remained. That night the lookout called out a light, low and steady on the water. They sailed toward it until the sun came up over a bank of sand and shingle, and there, lying on the wet stones, was a single flat stone with three triangles cut into its face, and beside it a line of bare footprints walking inland. The island had no people on it, the charts said so, and the footprints ended at a fresh-cut hole where the arrow had fitted exactly.

Mabry kept the arrowhead in her coat for the rest of her life. When the young men asked how she had found the coast in weather like that, she would only take it out, turn it toward them, and say it had never once pointed away from anyone who was willing to follow it.