A grid of twelve black ink ornamental arrow and swirl designs on a white background, shown as tattoo flash without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twelve black ornamental arrow designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a sheet of twelve arrow-shaped ornamental designs arranged in two columns and six rows. Each design pairs a pointed head with a tapering shaft ending in curls, dots, fans or fine trailing lines. The artwork is rendered in solid black linework and fills on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Arrow Swirl Flourish Scroll Dot Fan Ornament Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pim had painted arrows for thirty-one years, and he kept the pattern book in the drawer beneath the size-four brushes, where his wife had once kept the good scissors. Twelve designs, drawn in Indian ink on squared paper by his own father: a barbed head, a shaft that thinned to nothing, a spiral at the tail like a fern uncurling. Each one meant something different to a shopkeeper. The fan-tailed ones said bargain. The dotted shafts said the way is longer than it looks.

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On the Tuesday the Gallagher sisters came in with a sign for the new tea room on Marine Parade, and the younger one, Bridie, kept tapping the sheet with a fingernail. 'That one,' she said, pointing at the design with three fine trailing lines. 'The one that goes off like it's got somewhere else to be.' Harold had not drawn that one for anyone in a decade. He told her it was too fussy for a fascia, too thin to read from the road.

She insisted, so he cut the stencil, loaded the sable and painted the arrow in gold leaf above the door, the shaft running past the window ledge and curling away over the brick. It took the whole afternoon. When he stepped back into the salt wind to check the line, the trailing tail had lifted in the breeze and seemed to point not at the tea room but at the harbour steps, where a boy in a yellow mac stood with a kite string in his fist and no kite on the end of it.

Harold looked at the arrow for a long while. Then he went inside and, for the first time in thirty-one years, wrote something in the margin of the pattern book beside it: points where people are going, not where they've been.