Black and grey tattoo design of a crossed bow and arrow with scrolling flourishes, with the words Skin of a Lady and Heart of a Hunter running along the arrow shaft.

Crossed bow and arrow with quote lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a bow and arrow crossed diagonally, with ornate scrolls and swirls along the bow limbs and feathered fletching on the arrow. The words Skin of a Lady and Heart of a Hunter are set in a serif typeface along the shaft. The linework is sketchy with soft grey shading, and the design sits centred on a plain white background.

Lettering Bow Arrow Scroll Swirl Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear the spokeshave through the wall of the bowyer's on Lantern Row long after the gas lamps are lit. By eleven the rasp has stopped, and when you push open the back door the workshop smells of linseed and cold wood. Old Ambrose is bent over the bench, a length of yew clamped between two cheeks, and pinned above it is a scrap of paper with the words he has been muttering all week: skin of a lady, heart of a hunter.

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"Your sister wants them on the limbs," he says without looking up. "Scrollwork either side, like the guard of a rapier, and the words running down the shaft where the eye can't miss them." You take the paper and read it twice. Maddy kept the glove stall by the fish market for six years, stitching kid leather for men who came in off the moors smelling of pine and powder, and she never once let any of them see her hands shake. She has never asked for anything from you before.

Ambrose hands you the scribing knife and steps back. The grain of the yew runs true, and you cut each letter a little deeper than the last, the lamp hissing beside your elbow, until the quote sits along the wood like a line of Latin on a church wall. Somewhere out past the rooftops a dog barks twice and falls silent.

At first light Maddy climbs the ladder to the flat roof above the market with the bow across her back. She nocks the arrow, draws to her cheek, and the string sings a note that carries over the slate and the gulls and the sleeping stalls. The feathers catch the sun as the shaft leaves her fingers, and for a moment the whole street looks up.