Fine line black tattoo of an arrow with feathered fletching and a looping curve beneath it, placed on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow with feathered fletching on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs horizontally across the side of the ribs, with leaf-like feathers drawn along the shaft and an arrowhead at the right end. A thin curved line loops beneath the shaft, giving the design an infinity-like shape. The tattoo is done in black ink with clean outlines and no shading, and it sits against plain skin with a maroon top and a hand with a ring in the frame.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Feather Infinity

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire wants feeding and so do you. Now, you have heard of the fletcher of Harrowmere who made arrows for the lord's archers and charged them by the feather? No? Then hush and let me tell it right.

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His name was Tobiah Quell, and he was a careful man, so careful that he counted every barb on every shaft before the glue went on. One winter the lord's son rode out to hunt a stag that had been raiding the orchards, and the lad asked for one arrow that would fly true even if the wind turned against it. Tobiah sat up three nights with goose feathers from the marsh, stripping each vane until the leaves of it lay along the shaft like ferns on a cold stream. He fixed a head of grey iron and wound a thin cord of gut beneath the shaft in a single curved loop, so the arrow would have something to hold its shape by.

The lad loosed it at dusk. The arrow rose, and rose, and then it did not come down. People in Harrowmere swear they saw it turn over the hill, bend back under itself, and sail past the church tower again, slow as a swallow, always circling the valley. Tobiah's daughter, Ilse, stood in the yard with a bucket of water and watched it cross the sky nine times before she set the bucket down.

Every evening after that she left the workshop door open and a bowl of fat on the sill. The old man never came back to tend it. On the tenth night the arrow came low and dropped neatly into the bowl, and a single feather stuck to the fat. Ilse kept it in her apron pocket for the rest of her life. Some say the arrow is still going round, and that if you wish carefully enough, it will carry the wish back to whoever sent it.