Black and grey tattoo of a vertical arrow with stylised lettering reading May the odds be ever in your favor, on the inside of a forearm.

Arrow and lettering quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow with a feathered fletching runs down the centre of the design, with the words of a quote set in ornate, gothic-style lettering on either side of its shaft. The linework is dark and fairly fine, with the arrow shaded in grey and the letters filled in solid black. The skin is pale and the photograph is shot straight on against a white, textured background.

Lettering Forearm Arrow Lettering Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wedding was set for the Saturday after the harvest, but the miller would not give his daughter's hand until a man split the willow wand at forty paces. Seven suitors had tried since midsummer, and seven had walked home with their bows across their shoulders and nothing to show for it. On the morning of the eighth, the village gathered on the mill green with cider in stone jugs, and a stranger from the hill farms stood at the line holding an arrow he had cut and fletched himself.

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Old Tam the bowyer, who had made every bow in the valley, leaned on the gate and told anyone who would listen that the odds were a sorry thing for a man with no name on the list. The stranger only nodded. He touched the shaft before he drew, Tam said later, the way a reader touches a line before reading it aloud, and the miller's daughter saw him do it from the mill window and laughed for the first time in a month.

The arrow flew low, struck the wand a finger's width above the cleft, and snapped it clean. The green went quiet, then roared. The miller frowned, took the two halves in his hands, and turned them over looking for a trick. There was none. He asked the stranger why he had not used a second arrow, and the stranger said he had never needed one.

The miller gave his daughter away that autumn. She kept the broken wand on the sill of the window where she had watched the shot, and when people asked her about the odds she only said they had been in someone's favour, and that she had been glad of it.