Close photo of a small black arrow tattoo with script beside it on a forearm, next to a gold bracelet and a black and white patterned dress.

Arrow and script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a forearm showing a small black arrow with a feathered fletching and a line of script running along its shaft, only part of which is legible. The linework is clean and solid with no visible shading, and the ink is black on pale skin. The background is out of focus, with a patterned black and white dress and gold bracelets framing the arm.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Arrow Script Word Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tomas kept the barge Marigold on the Ouse for forty winters and never once let his grandson take her through the lock at Naburn. "Wait," he said, every time, and the boy waited with cold hands on the tiller while the water sank away beneath the gates.

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One spring Edwin borrowed his uncle's bow and loosed an arrow from the towpath at a heron. It flew wide, struck the coal boat moored opposite and stuck fast in the planking. When he climbed aboard to fetch it, he found grey goose feathers at the tail and a line of faded ink running down the shaft: the name of a woman he had never met, and then one word, again.

He asked his grandfather who she was. Tomas leaned on the rail a long time before he answered. She had been a lockkeeper's girl, he said, who could hit a tin cup at fifty yards, and she had promised to come back up the river when the ice went out. She had not. He had kept the arrow ever since, because a barge carries whatever is loaded into it, and nobody unloads a thing that matters.

Edwin tied the arrow to a length of red wool and dropped it over the stern. Next morning it was lying on the deck again, dry as bone, the wool knotted twice. Tomas looked at it, then at the grey water, and said nothing. He lifted the tiller out of its bracket and handed it to his grandson.