Fine line black arrow tattoo across the inner ankle of a bare foot, with a thin shaft running around the leg and the head and fletching at each end.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot and ankle with a small black arrow tattoo. A thin single line forms the shaft, which wraps around the ankle, with a solid arrowhead on one side and a striped fletching on the other. The background is a soft-focus view of water and another person's legs, with the tattoo in sharp focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Wenn was up over the mill weir the morning Aunt Maud sent me down to the bank with the long bow and a bundle of goose feathers still smelling of the yard. Nobody on the far side could reach us by boat. The ferry rope had snapped in the night and the carter's boy was stuck on the wrong bank with a cart full of salt fish.

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I cut the arrow myself. Maud had taught me to bind the fletching in three stripes of dark and pale, so a shot could be read even in grey light, and I left the head solid and heavy so it would bite the far bank and not skip. Round its shaft I tied the finest linen thread I owned, the kind we used for bowstrings, and I wound the loose end around my wrist twice and knotted it, because Maud said a line that is not tied to the archer is a line that gets lost.

The first shot fell short and drifted into the reeds. The second dropped into the hands of the carter's boy, who was waving his cap like a fool, and he hauled the thread across, then the cord, then the stout rope, until the ferry could be drawn back on it. I sat on the bank with my boots in the cold water and the thread singing taut, watching the far side come to us one hand at a time.

That evening Maud pressed a penny into my palm and said I had shot straight. I told her the arrow had done the work. She laughed and said an arrow only goes where someone is sure of the aim, and went back to her feathers.

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