Fine line black tattoo of a vertical arrow, dots and dashes running down a forearm, ending in a chevron arrowhead.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical arrow and dot sequence on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical sequence of small black marks runs down the forearm, starting with an arrow shape near the top, followed by a row of dots and short strokes, and ending with a double chevron at the bottom. The linework is thin and precise, with the dots and dashes spaced evenly along a central line. The image is black and white against a dark background, with the tattoo centred on the arm.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Arrow Dot Chevron Dashes Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman at Cold Harbour counted his passengers by notches on a willow stick, one for each soul he carried across the grey water. By the third winter of the drought he had cut so many that the stick would not hold another. So when the girl came down the shingle with a sack of salt and a dog that would not stop shivering, he took his knife and cut nothing at all.

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Her name was Ilse Varn and she said she was going to the far shore to find her brother, who had gone for the tithe-wheat and not come back. The ferryman asked what she would pay. She showed him the marks she had scratched on her wrist with a nail: a little arrow pointing up, then a row of dots and short strokes like the stitches of a hem, then two chevrons pointing down the way the geese fly in autumn. He had seen such marks on the bark of the ash trees upriver, where travellers had once left their road home.

He asked what the marks meant. She said they were a map, and the arrow was the way she had come, and the chevrons were the way she meant to go. The dots were the nights she had slept. The ferryman laughed for the first time in a year, poled her across, and when they reached the far bank he pointed to a path climbing into the rushes. Above the reeds, a single heron lifted and turned toward the north. She followed it, and he never cut the stick again.