Small black fine line arrow tattoo on the ankle of a person whose hand holds their foot on white bedsheets.

Arrow tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black arrow with a pointed head and angled fletching runs vertically up the side of an ankle. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the tattoo is set against pale skin. A hand with a gold ring and dark nail polish holds the foot on a rumpled white sheet, filling the upper left of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Arrow Ankle Hand Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Uncle Desmond never let me touch the goose feathers until I could split a quill without tearing it. We worked at the bench in the shed at the bottom of the garden, where the runner beans climbed the wire and the whole village smelled of cut grass on a Saturday. He had a way of holding the shaft against the light, squinting down it like a man checking a rifle barrel, and then he would say, "Straight enough to kill a rabbit, not straight enough to kill a bishop."

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Every arrow he made carried the same mark, a head like a spearpoint and the fletching angled back so the feathers would spin. He called it the Hollins fletch after the man who taught him, and he would not let me cut it until my hand stopped shaking. The day I finally did, he sat on the upturned bucket and watched me file the notch with a triangle of glass, then nodded once and went back to the beans without saying a word.

In August the parish held its archery day on the cricket field, and Desmond shot the last arrow of the morning over the hedge. We heard the thock of it hitting wood somewhere beyond the rectory. Nobody went to look. He just smiled, wiped his fingers on his trousers, and said the arrow had gone to find the apple tree at the back of the vicarage, where it had been trying to get to for forty years.

I still have the shed. The bench is grey now, the glass blade sits in a tin of nails, and the apple tree still bears by the wall. Some autumns I walk over and look along the bark for a steel point, and I never find one, which is exactly how he would have wanted it.