Arrow tattoo on the side of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow with a triangular head and feathered fletching points to the right across the side of a foot. The linework is thin and even, filled with solid black ink and no shading. The greyscale photograph shows the arrow centred on pale skin against a dark background.

Fine line Other Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are still counting the arrows when the wind turns, and Old Hob calls up from the mill that the tide is wrong for the ferry. The keep at Carrow Scar has lost its roof to three winters, so you climb to the gap where the north wall fell and sit among the nettles with the quiver across your knees. Eleven shafts are left, goose-fletched, the feathers gone grey with damp.

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Hob's grandson is out on the flats with the cart. You can see his lantern bobbing where the causeway has drowned. Nobody else in Carrow knows how to loose a bow that far, and your father never taught you, but he did leave the stave hanging on a nail behind the chapel door, and you have had three nights to learn it from a book with the pages stuck together.

You nock the first arrow and draw until the string sings against the leather glove. The shaft lifts, bends the air, and drops short into the marsh with a sound like a spoon falling on slate. The second goes further. For the third you bind a rag soaked in lamp oil to the head, and when it lands on the sand beyond the posts the boy lifts his hand, and you know he has seen where the true line runs.

Eleven shafts in all, and ten of them gone to the mud. The last one you keep, because it was the only one that flew straight. You slip the empty quiver over your shoulder and walk down the hill in the dark, the arrow still in your fist, the lantern coming up the causeway to meet you.