Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two arrows on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white mirror photograph of a person's torso from roughly the chest to the hip, with one hand resting on the hip. A small tattoo of two thin black arrows, both pointing in the same direction, sits horizontally on the ribs. The linework is crisp and fine, with no shading or colour, and the tattoo occupies a small part of the frame against a bathroom background.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Gull Terrace has eleven rooms and only one working clock, so the guests set their days by the tide tables pinned in the hall. You learn quickly that the wind takes the front door if you leave it unlatched, and that Mrs Pellow will charge you for a towel you did not ask for. Still, you stay the week in room six, because the window looks straight down the shingle to the lifeboat slip, and because the man in room four has been leaving small pencil arrows on the skirting boards.

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They are everywhere once you start looking. Two thin strokes on the wallpaper behind the wardrobe, two more at the foot of the stairs, two on the sill of the bathroom door. Every pair points the same way, towards the sea, as if someone had been drawing directions for a lost boat. Mrs Pellow says the last lodger, a retired signalman called Arthur Dunning, did it before he went out one February morning and never came back for his bag.

On the sixth day you follow them. They lead past the bins, along the wall of the chandler's yard, and stop at a tarred post where the tide has already begun to lick the bottom. Someone has scratched the same pair of arrows there, fresh enough that the wood is still pale. Beyond it the water is flat and grey, and a single bell buoy knocks in the swell. You stand there with the arrows at your back, pointing you out to sea, and you understand that they were never a warning. They were a way of saying I went this way, and you can come too if you like.