Black and grey fine line arrow with leaves and vines running across the back, with the lettering WARR;OR above the shaft.

Arrow and vines with WARR;OR lettering

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an arrow with a feathered tail and leafy vines wrapped along the shaft, with the arrowhead pointing to the upper right. Serif lettering above the arrow reads WARR;OR, with a semicolon-like mark in place of the letter I. Soft shading on the shaft and leaves contrasts with clean outlines, and the image is taken close up on bare skin.

Lettering Botanical Back Arrow Vine Leaves Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Coldstream wanted to know why a grown man was carrying a bundle of ash arrows across the Tweed at six in the morning, and Tomas Riddell said they were for a club shoot in Kelso, which was true enough, as far as it went.

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Aunt Ruth had fletched for the Kelso club for thirty years. She wrapped every shaft with a green sprig of ivy before she bound on the feathers, because she said a bare arrow was a lonely thing and would fly off-line looking for company. The last box had gone out in March with a label in her cramped capitals and a note saying the buyer was a lad called Dougie Pringle who had never once hit the target. Send them anyway, she had written.

The officer slid one out of the bundle and turned it in his gloved fingers. Along the shaft, where the ivy thinned, Ruth had burned a word with a heated nib, the letters leaning the way she leant when she was tired. WARR, then a small dark mark where the I should have been, then OR. He frowned at it. Tomas could have told him the mark was the slip of a hand that had run out of patience, or the mark of someone who would not be hurried, but he had been up all night and the river was loud under the bridge.

The officer put the arrow back, pressed the bundle gently against the boy's chest as if it might bruise, and waved him on. Tomas drove the last mile with the window down. Ruth had never liked a full stop. She said a sentence wanted room to breathe, and that the little mark was the place where you held your breath and went on. At the next lay-by he pulled over, took out the final arrow, and touched the burnt mark with his thumb before driving on towards Kelso, where a boy with a bow was waiting.