Black and grey tattoo of two crossed arrows over a symmetrical flower with fern-like fronds, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows over a botanical mandala on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of two crossed arrows laid over a symmetrical flower with fern-like fronds radiating outwards. The bold outlines are filled with fine stippling and shading that gives the flower depth and texture. Only black ink and grey tones show against pale skin and a plain light background.

Botanical Dotwork Calf Arrow Crossed arrows Mandala Flower Fern Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobiah Rook had worked the archery act for the Marrow Brothers Travelling Circus for thirty-one years, and in all that time he had never missed the ring. The tent had shrunk around him since. The lions went to a zoo in Carlisle, the clowns drifted off to the coast, and by the autumn of the bad harvest there was only Tobiah, a grey mare called Bramble, and Ada Wint, who swept sawdust for her keep and slept in the wagon with the painted horses.

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One wet evening in a field outside Lancaster, Ada asked him why he always loosed two arrows together when one would do. Tobiah said a single arrow told a story about one thing. Two crossed told a story about the place where two things met. He took a stick and drew in the mud: first a flower, then fronds spreading from its heart like the spokes of a cartwheel. Then he laid two sticks across the middle.

That was how his mother told it, he said. Two hunters quarrelled over a stag in a wood where no flower grew. They shot together, both arrows struck the same ground, and out of the wound in the earth came a bloom with ferns growing outward, each frond a promise kept. Ada said it sounded like a lie. Tobiah said most true things did until somebody stood where they had happened.

At the last show in Kendal, a cold wind flattened the canvas and the crowd was eleven people and a dog. Tobiah's hands would not stop shaking. Ada took the bow from him, nocked two arrows, and loosed them high. They crossed above the sawdust and came down together in the damp earth at the centre of the ring, where they stood upright and quivering, and the eleven people clapped as if they had been given something, which in a way they had.