Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a feathered archer drawing a bow, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered archer with bow on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in profile wears a feathered headdress and a stippled, patterned top while drawing a bow with an arrow. The figure is built from fine outlines and dense dot shading, with geometric triangular shapes at the waist and bow. The design is in black and grey and sits across the shoulder blade area of the back.

Dotwork Geometric Back Bow Arrow Feather Headdress Woman Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third evening the crows had learned your timing better than the gardener had. They sat along the top of the yew hedge in a row of black stitches, waiting for the thump of the back door, and they lifted the moment you stepped onto the gravel with the bow already strung. You had been hired to keep them off the cherries, not to win an argument with birds, but the fruit was reddening and the old man who owned the walled garden had stopped speaking to anyone who wasn't carrying a shaft.

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He watched you from the bench under the pergola, a flat cap on his knee and a tin of boiled sweets he never offered. "Feathers are for the arrow," he said, "not the hand. Aim at what's behind the bird." You thought he was a fool. Then, on the fourth morning, you drew on the crow nearest the gate, held the line past it, and loosed over the wall, where a cloud of starlings was turning in a shape like a broken gate. The shaft went through nothing you could see, and the crows dropped off the hedge one by one as if their strings had been cut.

That evening the cherries hung untouched. The old man counted the rows without speaking, pressed a sweet into your palm, and said the birds would be back in a fortnight, as they always were. He was right. You kept the bow in the shed after that, its limbs wrapped in cloth, and the arrows stood in a bucket by the door with their fletching the colour of wet slate.

On the last day of the season you found a single grey feather caught under the bowstring. You pressed it between the pages of the wage ledger, where the gardener's payments were written in pencil, so that each week you would open it and remember which bird you had chosen not to hit.