Small black fine line arrow tattoo with the years 1966-1998 and a script word beneath it, placed on the side of a person's ribs.

Arrow with dates and script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow points left with feathered fletching on the right, with the years 1966-1998 above it and a single script word below. The linework is thin and even, with no shading beyond solid black ink. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribs against bare skin, with a dark sports top and a navel piercing visible in the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Arrow Date Script Lettering Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the bakehouse lit its ovens, Maud Pelling swept the flour from the step and found an arrow lying point-first in the frost, its goose feathers stiff and grey. Nobody in Thornbury fletched anymore. The last fletcher had gone into the churchyard the winter the river froze, and his shop stood with its door nailed shut across the lane from her ovens.

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She knew whose it was. Old Tobias had left a box of unfinished shafts with a note saying they were to be sold, and this one he had marked with a notch and a name scratched beside the fletching: Ira. Her brother had been called that, though nobody in the village said the name now. Maud turned the arrow in her floury hands. It was fletched the wrong way, the feathers laid so they would catch the wind from behind, and the shaft was dark where someone's thumb had rested on it for years.

At first light she carried the arrow up to the bell tower, where the ringers gathered for the morning peal. The ringer, a thin man called Harrow, laughed at her, then stopped when he saw the feathers. "Tobias always fletched them backward," he said. "Said an arrow should face the road it came from, so the archer remembers where he's been."

Maud went back to the bakehouse and set the arrow on the sill above the proving dough, pointing west toward the churchyard. The loaves rose under it all morning, and by the time the sun cleared the hedge the room smelled of crust and cold smoke. She left it there, pointing home.