Hand-coloured drawing of a tattoo design showing a teal-tipped arrow wrapped in a vine of small magenta flowers, with a magenta feathered fletching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow entwined with flowering vine

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of an arrow running vertically down the centre of the page. A green vine with small magenta and purple flowers winds around the shaft, and the feathered fletching at the base is shaded in magenta and pink. The linework is fine and the colours are applied with soft pencil shading on a plain white background.

Botanical Arrow Vine Flower Feather Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last arrow I fletched for Lord Aldous was the one that bloomed. I had cut the shaft from ash growing along the moat wall, and while the glue dried on the head I wound a length of bindweed round it to hold the binding tight, the way my mother taught me at the bench. I meant to cut it free after. Nobody told me bindweed never listens. By the third night the tendrils had gone green up the wood, small magenta flowers had opened at every knot, and Cook swore the whole kitchen smelled of the wine press.

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The keep had no roof left, only the great hall with its tapestries rotting on the walls and the rain coming through in grey ropes. Forty of us held the gatehouse against the Vantner levies, who had dug in across the ford with their tents and their patience. Aldous wanted arrows for the dawn sortie and he wanted them fast, and he did not look at the shafts I handed him. He looked at the fletching, pink from the foxglove I had boiled for dye, laughed, and said a woman's arrow ought to be a pretty one.

He took it anyway. At first light he drew it on the broken parapet and loosed, and I watched the arrow climb over the ford in a slow green curve, flowers trailing from its shaft like smoke. It struck the rear axle of the Vantner ram and stayed there, quivering. By noon the vine had split the timber and the men were cutting it away with billhooks, swearing at the blossoms that would not come off their hands.

Aldous never shot another arrow of mine. He went down the stair on the twelfth day and did not come back up. I kept the spare shaft wrapped in linen in the bottom of my box, and every spring, when I open it, there are new buds at the knot, pale as a child's fingernail, waiting for someone to tie them back.