Forearm tattoo of a thin black linework arrow over red, orange, green, teal and purple watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour arrow on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black linework arrow with a feathered fletching and a solid triangular head runs vertically down the forearm. Soft, bleeding splashes of red and orange sit above the shaft, with green, teal and purple washes behind and below it. The arrow is centred in the frame and the colour fades out at the edges of the splashes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every dry season the men at Kessel Well argued about whether the road had a bottom. Ibrahim said yes, a seam of old lake lay under the sand, and Tova said no, it was only more sand going down. They settled it the way they settled everything, by sending a boy with a bow to the top of the ridge and telling him to shoot as far as he could.

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The boy was called Pell and he was no good with a bow. His arrow went wide over the flats and came down in the shade of the salt bush, its shaft black against the grey, its feathers ruffled like a crow after rain. Where the point struck the crust, the ground did not crack. It bled. Red came up first, then orange, as though someone had tipped a jar of paint into a basin of dust, and the colour spread through the still air until it reached the old tyre tracks and stopped there, shy of the road.

Tova went out with a spade the next morning. Under the bloom she found the arrowhead, unbroken, and beneath it a dark thread of soil that smelled of rain. She dug until her hands were raw. By noon there was water, green-tinged and cold, rising to fill the hole the arrow had made.

Pell never shot again. The men said he had found the bottom of the road, and nobody argued with that.

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