Black and grey tattoo of an arrow with hanging shaded feathers and beads across the side ribs, above the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow and hanging feathers on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an arrow lying horizontally across the side of the ribs, with three shaded feathers hanging beneath it on short beaded strings. The feathers are rendered with soft grey shading and fine feather detail, and the arrow has a simple shaded shaft and fletching. The photograph is taken close up against bare skin, with the tattoo centred in the frame and the navel visible at the lower left.

Ribs Arrow Feather Bead String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goose feathers had hung on the cord since the thaw, three grey ones bound by their quills, and Mabli counted the beads beneath them twice before she let her father go up to the ridge without her. Forty-one beads. Her father said each one was a shot that had come home with something on it: a hare, a crow, once a stag that had nearly taken the shed roof with it.

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"You keep the count," he said, tapping the arrow he had fletched that morning, its shaft still pale where the plane had worked it. "If I'm late, tie the next bead on and don't wait for the snow to lift." He laughed when he said it, and she laughed too, because he was never late.

The wind came off the ridge before noon, and by dusk the valley was a bowl of white. Mabli sat by the door with the cord in her lap, turning each bead between her fingers the way her grandmother had turned her prayer knots. At midnight she took the last arrow from its peg and climbed.

She found him at the oak where the path forked, sitting with his back to the trunk and the arrow lying across his knees. He had not shot anything. The light had failed him and his ankle had folded on the ice, and he was alive only because he had kept talking to the owls. She knelt, tied the forty-second bead to the cord beside the others, and let the feathers swing in the cold until they pointed back down the path toward home.