Fine line black arrow tattoo with the script words real or not real across the lower back, shown above a second close view of an arrow with the word real on the upper arm.

Arrow tattoo with real or not real script

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The top photograph shows a fine line arrow running across the lower back above denim jeans, with the script words real or not real set along the shaft. The lower photograph shows a matching arrow with the word real in script on the upper arm, with a small mole near the lettering. Both tattoos are in black ink with clean, even linework and no shading, and the framing is a simple two-panel collage.

Fine line Lettering Back Upper arm Arrow Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The archer Hallam Dree had a bow that hummed when the wind was wrong, and the queen of Orrendy sent for her in the dry month of Sarn. The queen had a question. Her sons had both gone to the border towns and come back with stories, and she could no longer tell which were true. So she brought the archer to the high hall and set a stone before her and asked her to shoot the question into the air.

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Hallam drew the bow. The arrow she loosed did not fly far. It turned in the cold light above the hall, dipped once over the queen's table, and came down in the rushes at the feet of the younger son, who laughed and then did not. The queen went to pick it up. On the shaft, in a hand like river water, someone had written real, and below it, smaller, or not real, and the queen understood that the arrow had been asking her and not the other way round.

She sent the sons out to the border again. Hallam kept the bow. Every spring after, when the marsh birds came back, she would stand at the walls and fire a single arrow over the water, and the herders' children would run to find where it landed.

Nobody in Orrendy ever agreed on what the arrow had meant. The old men said it was a test. The women said it was a kindness. Hallam said only that a true thing will still be true after you have said it twice, and that was the end of the question, as far as she was concerned.