Fine line black arrow tattoo with a diamond head, dot details and feathered fletching on the side of the ribs.

Fine line arrow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs diagonally across the skin, with a diamond-shaped head, three small dots along the shaft and a feathered tail. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The arrow sits on the side of the torso, partly beside a blue lace garment, against a plain pale background.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Feather Dot Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel found Tobias Penrose on the slipway with a bundle of ash shafts across his knees, sorting them by weight the way other men sorted cards. The ferry had gone without her. The tide was coming in over the boards, and the message she carried, folded small inside her glove, asked for one thing only: the grey-fletched arrow he had promised the lighthouse keeper's boy before the storm.

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He did not look up. He held one shaft to the lamp and squinted down its length. 'Feathers first,' he said. 'Then the head. You can't fly a thing that doesn't know where it's going.' He drew a sliver of brass from his pocket, cut into a diamond no wider than a fingernail, and bound it to the ash with waxed thread. Three knots followed, spaced evenly, and he counted each one aloud as if reckoning miles.

'Three for the ferry,' he said, 'three for the lamp, three for the bell. Nobody sees the dots, but the boy will feel them when he holds it.' Mabel asked what the tail was for. He tapped the fletching, which was not feathers at all but pale shavings of goose quill, cut to a point so fine they seemed to lift in the draught.

He handed the arrow to her and she understood the message had been a pretext all along. She carried it along the quay in the dusk, past shuttered net lofts and a boat with her name painted in red, and when she reached the lighthouse steps the boy was waiting, his hand already open. The arrow was lighter than she expected. She gave it over and the boy turned it to the last of the light, grinning, and sighted it straight out across the water toward the far shore, where the ferry was tying up.