Black bands and a blue watercolour-style arrow tattoo on the inside of a forearm, with the arrow placed below the bands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow and bands on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm showing three solid black bands wrapping around the arm, with the outer band fading to dots at its edge. Below the bands sits an arrow with a black tip and fletching, and its shaft and feathers are filled with soft blue and pink splashes of colour. The background is dark, and the arm fills most of the frame.

Forearm Arrow Band Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Ysolde came down the inn stairs with her bow across her back and told the innkeeper's boy to bar the door. The snow had been falling on the pass for three days. The Kettle and Crow held eleven guests, a sheep drover, and a pedlar who would not stop coughing. Nobody had seen her come in. She was simply sitting by the banked fire when the boy arrived with the ash pail, her boots steaming, her string slack.

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The valley folk had a rule older than the inn. Every doorpost carried three black bands, rubbed in with lamp soot, one for each winter the drifts had taken someone from the road. When a whiteout came down, somebody loosed an arrow from the upper window toward the chapel. The shaft was dipped in blue lamp oil, and in the cold the oil burned pink at the feathers, so anyone out on the pass could see which way the valley lay.

That night a man's voice came out of the snow, thin and far off, calling the same word over and over. The boy wanted to open the door. Ysolde said the arrow had to go before the wind turned, and she climbed to the window with her father's ash bow and her father's grey goose feathers. The string sang once. The arrow went out trailing blue fire and dropped into the drift a stone's throw from the chapel steps. A bell answered it from somewhere below.

Three travellers came in at first light, all of them grey to the knee. The drover counted them twice and sat down hard on the bench. Ysolde hung her bow back on its peg and took soot from the hearth. She painted a fourth band on the doorpost, then stopped, and only the top half of it went on. She left the rest of the wood bare for the next winter to decide.