Back of a woman with a small black geometric tattoo of stacked arrows and chevrons running vertically down the upper back, with a silver chain draped across the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical arrow motif on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of stacked arrowheads and chevron-like geometric lines runs vertically down the upper back. The linework is solid and fairly bold, with no shading, and the design is shown against bare skin. A silver chain and a grey strappy top sit around the tattoo, and the subject's face is not visible.

Geometric Back Arrow Chevron Geometric pattern Chain Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide came in quicker than Tobias Wrenn had promised, and by the time the lantern guttered I was up to my knees in grey silt with a sack of eels on my back and no idea which way the causeway ran. Wrenn had sworn the path was clear. Wrenn had sworn a great many things over the years, most of them about the price of salt.

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What saved me were the marker posts. Every stake along the Harrow Flats had a column of black arrowheads cut into its face, one stacked on the next, with a zigzag of chevrons beneath them like the teeth of a saw. My grandmother cut them, and her mother before her. The old rule was simple: the arrows point to the nearest firm ground, and the chevrons count the posts, so you know how far you have left to walk. I found the first stake, then the second, counting the chevrons under my breath the way she taught me.

Near the sixth post the arrows stopped pointing at the water and turned hard left. I had always assumed that was a carver's slip. But the silt there was thin and ribbed with sand, and it bore my weight. At the seventh post the causeway stones came up out of the dark under my boots, wet and square, exactly where the carvings said they would be.

I sat on those stones until the moon rose, eels sliding about in the sack, and I thought about Wrenn, who never carved a post in his life and still insisted the marsh belonged to him. Next spring I will take a chisel out there myself and add one more arrow to the seventh stake, for whoever comes off the flats in the dark and needs telling which way is home.