Fine line black arrow tattoo with curled scroll details on the upper back, centred below the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow with scrolls on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black arrow runs vertically across the upper back, with its point at the top and feathered fletching at the base. Two curling, leaf-like scrolls extend out from the shaft on either side, drawn in delicate fine linework with solid black ink. The tattoo sits centrally on smooth skin against short hair, and the rest of the frame is softly lit with a plain neckline visible at the bottom.

Fine line Back Arrow Scroll Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last week of August the wasps got into the Pennock orchard and the old pear tree split down the middle, so Hannah Dunning went out with her father's bow and a single shaft she had cut herself from ash. She was a fletcher's daughter and knew the feathers had to lie flat, the way leaves lie along a branch in still air. She had spent the whole of July binding them with waxed thread until her fingers were stained green.

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The arrow went up over the wall and dropped somewhere in the long grass beyond the boundary stone. Hannah walked the rows looking for it. Every apple she passed had a bruise on its shoulder, and every bruise had a wasp in it. At the far end, where the ground dipped toward the mill race, she found the shaft standing upright in the earth, point to the sky, and beside it an old man in a grey coat who was picking up windfalls and putting them in a basket without bending his knees.

'You shot my tree,' he said. 'I shot the wasps,' she said. He considered this and nodded at the arrow. 'Then you'd best take back what you sent.' She pulled it free. Two curling leaves had come up out of the soil around its shaft, pale and cold as if they had grown there overnight. When she touched them they unrolled like something waking, and the old man was gone, and the basket was full of pears that did not split.

She carried the arrow home and nailed it above the door. Every September after, when the first wasps came, the pears on the Pennock side ripened sweet and whole.