Fine line black arrow above the script words 'this too shall pass' tattooed along the ribs of a person wearing a light blue top.

Arrow and script quote on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black arrow runs horizontally across the skin, with a line of cursive script beneath it reading 'this too shall pass'. The linework is fine and even, with the ink appearing solid and dark against the skin. The tattoo is centred in a close, slightly angled crop, with a light blue fabric visible above it.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Arrow Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the arrow in the wet leaves at the edge of Hollin Wood, the morning after the storm has brought down the old ash by the stile. Its shaft is pale where the bark has peeled away, and the three goose feathers at its end have gone grey with rain. Nobody in Fenwick Cross has drawn a bow since Tam Breck was carried out of his cottage, yet the point is still sharp enough to nick your thumb when you test it.

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You take it to Marjorie Pell at the forge, because she knows who fletched what in the village. She turns it under the lamp and says it is her husband's work, which cannot be right, since he has been dead eleven winters. Then she shows you the nock, where he cut the same words into every shaft he ever made: this too shall pass. He said it to boys who lost their first matches, to widows at the graveside, to himself the year the frost killed the barley. You ask her what it meant to him. She laughs and says it meant he was tired of crying over spilt milk.

That night you sit on the stone wall with the arrow across your knees and look at the ash stump where the storm tore through. Green shoots are already pushing from the split trunk, low and stubborn, and you think of the rain on the feathers and the bead of blood on your thumb.

In the morning you walk back to the forest edge and lay the arrow in the crook of the stump, nock first, feathers up, the way he would have left a shaft for whoever came looking. By the time anyone finds it, the rain will have had its turn with it, and the wood will have begun to close over the place where the bark came away.