Hand-drawn flash sketch of two black ink arrows on lined paper, one with dotwork shading and one with geometric fills, each labelled with coordinates.

Two arrow designs with coordinates

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen sketch on lined notebook paper shows two horizontal arrows, each with a feathered head and a row of repeated shapes along the shaft. The left arrow uses stippled dotwork and solid triangles, while the right arrow uses open circles and diamond shapes, with a small mark above. Each arrow has a line of coordinate text above it, and the drawing is in black ink only.

Dotwork Geometric Arrow Coordinates Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad left his notebook in the caravan with two sets of numbers written on the back page, each one with an arrow drawn above it. The left arrow fades out at its feathers, as if someone had rubbed the tail with a thumb. The right one has a row of little rings along the shaft, like the hoops we used to throw at the bottle stall in Margate. I asked Nan what the numbers meant and she said they were where we were and where we were going, which is what she says about most things.

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The fair had been on the Hackney marshes since April, then moved to a field outside Dartford, and by August the rides were tired and the generator kept coughing. I spent the evenings with a torch and the notebook, typing the coordinates into my phone until a blue dot appeared over the river. Both points were in London, a few miles apart, and neither was anywhere a fair would ever stop. One was the back of a church car park. The other was scrub beside a bus depot, where a man in a yellow vest was shouting at pigeons.

On our last night before the lorries came, I walked the route on foot. The first arrow pointed me past the dodgems and out through a gap in the hedge. The second took me under the railway bridge, where someone had sprayed a white heart with two names inside it. At the end of the line, scratched into the concrete with a nail, was a circle around a small cross. Dad had buried a tin there years back, when the fair wintered in that same yard.

I dug with the trowel from the candyfloss van. The tin held a cheap brass compass, a ticket stub from the Big Wheel and a folded note in his square capitals that just said KEEP WALKING UNTIL IT STOPS SWINGING. I stood under the bridge with the compass flat in my palm, and the needle wobbled, then turned slowly north, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask.