Fine line black tattoo of an ornate arrow with swirling details running down the centre of a person's back along the spine.

Fine line arrow along the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow runs down the centre of the upper back, with a decorated arrowhead at the top, a feathered fletching at the bottom and curling scrollwork along the shaft. The linework is thin and even, and the design is in solid black ink with no shading. The bare back fills the frame in greyscale, with the tattoo placed near the middle of the composition.

Fine line Back Arrow Feather Swirl Scrollwork Ornament Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stones, the lot of you, because the north stair goes nowhere now and hasn't since my grandmother's grandmother was a girl. Sit where the wall still breaks the wind. Right. Carrow Keep had a bowman called Ansel Wray, who could split a rook's quill at three hundred paces, and who was never once allowed to sit down.

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The autumn the siege came up the valley, the lord sent Ansel to the broken tower with a sheaf of arrows and one order: keep the gate road clear until the rain put out their fires. He shot until the binding on his fingers went black and then red. Every shaft carried a notch cut above the fletching and a curl of blue thread pulled from his sister's shawl, so the men below would know whose hand had sent it. Nobody else in Carrow had thread that colour. Nobody else had a sister left to give it.

The rain came on the ninth night, as the old women had sworn it would, and the besiegers hauled their wagons back down the valley. Ansel had one arrow left, the finest of the lot, its head worked into a little crown of scrolls by the armourer who had taught him as a boy. He did not loose it. He climbed down the north stair, which still went down then, and gave it to the girl at the postern gate. Take this up to the hills, he told her, and don't let anyone make you shoot it.

She never did. She kept it hidden in the chapel wall, and the blue thread wore off the notches one by one, until only the feathers at the foot were left. Some say the arrow still lies in that wall, pointing up the stair to the sky. I have never found it, and I have looked for near on forty years. But when the wind comes through the broken tower and sings across the sills, you can hear the string, and you can tell which way it was aimed.