Black blackwork tattoo of an American flag made from arrows and arrowheads, with arrow shafts as stripes, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow flag tattoo on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a flag design built from solid black arrows: arrowheads form the star field in the upper left corner, and long arrow shafts with fletching run vertically to make the stripes. Bold, heavy black linework and solid fills give a graphic, stencil-like look. The tattoo runs down the side of the torso, with three full-length arrows on the left and the flag design filling the right, and the image is shot in a plain indoor setting.

Blackwork Ribs Arrow Arrowhead Flag American flag Stripe Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada counted the shafts twice before she let herself believe the number. Forty-nine arrowheads, fletched and ready on the drying rack, and the board needed fifty if the last star was going to sit where Tomas wanted it. She was one short, and the light was already going orange over the harbour wall.

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Tomas had chalked the pattern on a slate by the shed door: stripes down the left, a dark corner of stars at the top. 'Something the boats can see from the mouth of the bay,' he said, as though the sea were a crowd to be addressed. She told him arrows were for deer on the moor, not for dressing up a quay. He said their grandfather had nailed a painted sail above the Anchor after the lifeboat was lost, and nobody had minded the paint. 'Arrows are what we've got,' he said.

They worked until the tide turned, sanding the shafts smooth, binding the fletching with waxed thread, and tapping the heads into a board of old oak. Ada set the last row herself, holding each point steady while Tomas drove it home. When they stepped back, the field of stars looked like a sky full of small, sharp birds, every one of them pointing the same way.

The final stripe was a plain shaft with no fletching, and Ada left it bare. Tomas asked why. She said she had counted the boats and the names on the slate, and she did not yet know whose it was for. They hung the board on the wall facing the water, and the first gull to land on it turned its head and looked out to sea.