Black fine line tattoo of an arrow with leafy stems on the upper back, below dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow with leaves on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs diagonally across the upper back, with its fletching shaded in solid black at the lower left and its tip pointing up and right. Thin leafy stems and curling foliage wrap around the shaft on the right side. The linework is clean and even with light shading only, and the design is in black ink on pale skin, centred in the frame.

Fine line Back Arrow Leaves Foliage Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The arrow came down over the wall of Mistress Aldous's garden on the third morning of the thaw, and it did not lie dead. It stuck in the damp earth beside the bean rows and shivered there, and by noon the shaft had gone green at the nock.

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Old Tobiah the bowyer was sent for, because he had made the bow that shot it. He pulled at the arrow with both hands and it would not come. Leaves had opened along the shaft like buds on a hazel switch, and curling tendrils had wound round it twice, the way bindweed takes a fence post. "It's rooted," he said, and sat down on the wall to think about that.

Nobody in the village could agree what it meant. The priest said it was a sign. The miller said it was a nuisance and should be cut off at the ground. Mistress Aldous said nothing at all, but she carried a stool out to the bed every evening and sat with her hands in her lap, listening to the stems creak as they grew.

By midsummer the foliage had climbed to the fletching, and the feathers had softened into long leaves that shone wet in the morning. The head still pointed up and to the right, toward the gap in the hedge where the bowman's son had once stood, and nobody had the heart to tell him it was pointing toward home. He came back in autumn with a wagon and a length of rope, meaning to haul it out, but Mistress Aldous had already lifted the arrow herself, roots and all, and set it under the apple tree. It still stands there, taller than the wall now, and the children say that if you ask it a question in a low voice, it answers with a single leaf.