Black script quote reading I will fly, chase the wind and touch the sky, beside an arrow and feather tattoo on the side of a ribcage.

Arrow and feather with script quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the side of the ribcage shows an arrow with a feather fletching on one end and a feather hanging below it on the right. Two lines of cursive script run beneath the arrow, reading I will fly, chase the wind and touch the sky. The ink is solid black with fine, even linework and no shading, and the photo is taken at a close angle with the subject's torso filling the frame.

Lettering Ribs Arrow Feather Script Quote Wind Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Hardy glued the last vane on at half past five, and by seven the feathers had begun to lift at their tips as if they knew something she didn't. Her grandfather's fletching jig sat on the bench between a tin of beeswax and a bundle of ash shafts, and the workshop smelt of rain blowing in under the door. Across the lane the customs hut had its lamp lit already, though nobody had crossed the stile since Tuesday.

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Gran came to the doorway in her cardigan and watched for a while without speaking. Then she took the shaft, sighted down it the way she used to with the ponies on the fell, and shook her head. Feathers wanted warming before you bound them, she said, so hold them to the stove, love, and stop fighting the wax.

Tom's letter had come that morning from the far side of the hills, folded small and damp at one corner. He was on the flock up past the Scottish stones and wanted two arrows for the midsummer shoot at the boundary post, one for him and one for their father's old bow. Nell had written back in pencil that she would send them over with the post, though she was not sure the post still ran that far. She bound the last feather at dusk, then slid a scrap of paper under the wrapping with words she had copied from the back of a calendar: I will fly, chase the wind and touch the sky.

In the morning the wind had dropped and the mist sat low on the bracken. Nell walked the arrow to the stile, nocked it and let it go. It rose high over the lane and the customs lamp, the fresh feathers catching the light, and came down on the far side in the heather beside a grey dog that had started barking. Tom's whistle carried back over the wall, long and pleased.