Black and grey bird with an arrow tattoo on the upper chest near the shoulder of a woman with reddish hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and arrow on upper chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small bird in flight is shown with its wings raised, crossed by a long arrow pointing down and to the left. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with grey shading on the wings and body that gives the bird some depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a plain grey background and a hand resting at the lower right.

Chest Bird Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father taught you to string a bow before he taught you to count goats, and by the summer the Thracian traders came up the valley road you could put a shaft through a wood pigeon at forty paces. The traders paid in salt and bronze. You wanted the blue glass beads the trader's wife wore in her hair, and she said the price was a single bowshot, taken from the cliff above the millrace where the wind turns.

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So you climbed at dawn with the sun already hot on your neck and the river loud beneath you. A swallow was working the updraught, dropping and rising, its wings flung wide as though it were writing on the air. Your father said only fools loosed at a bird in flight. You nocked, drew to the ear, and held while the cliff seemed to breathe under your sandals. The swallow tipped toward the reeds. You let the string go.

The shaft caught it across the wing and turned it end over end into the reeds. You went down the goat track faster than was wise and found it lying in the mud with the arrow still pinning it, its black eye open and furious. You knelt there a long time. Then you drew the shaft out, slowly, the way your father drew splinters from your palm, and the bird shook itself and rose, crooked, toward the trader's roof.

Next morning the beads were waiting on the wall of the millhouse, strung on a single thread, and the trader's wife was laughing at you from her doorway. The swallow sat on the ridge above her, preening the bent feather, and it did not fly away when you came close.