Traditional style tattoos on the back of a hand, showing a bow and arrows, a half heart, red drops and the word ROMANTIC in black lettering.

Bow, arrows and lettering on the hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a hand with several black tattoos. A bow and arrows sit across the centre, with a half heart and the word ROMANTIC in block lettering on the left, and separate letters above. Bold black outlines and solid black fills are used, with small red drops adding the only colour.

Traditional Hand Bow Arrow Heart Blood drop Lettering Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bow came back to the shop in March with its string cut clean through, and Joan Ferris knew before she untied the parcel that her son had been fool enough to shoot at a heart again. She had kept the fletching bench since her husband went through the ice on the mere, and she still sorted goose feathers the way he had taught her, grey for the left wing, white for the right.

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The letters came with the bow, pinned inside its wrapping. L, M and C, cut from an old tin lid, and a half heart folded from brown paper with ROMANTIC written across it in the careless capitals of a man who had never once been asked to spell. Albert had gone to the war in the autumn and written only to say the arrows were flying true. Nothing about the heart, nothing about the girl at the lock-keeper's cottage.

She took the last shaft from the rack and pricked her thumb on the barb, the way her husband always had. A drop fell onto the paper heart and spread into the brown. She did not wipe it away. She sat with the bow across her knees until the lamp guttered, and understood that a bow is only a promise to let go.

In the morning she fletched a new arrow, grey feather on the left, and cut a single J into the shaft with her knife. She sent it south in a plain box with no note. Albert would know what it meant or he would not, and either way it would fly straight.