Fine line black arrow tattoo running diagonally across the side ribs, with a gold watch and gold bracelets on the wrist resting nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line arrow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, thin black arrow with a pointed head and feathered fletching runs diagonally across the side of the torso, above the hip. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink appears crisp against the skin. The composition is a close crop of the torso and wrist, with a gold watch and stacked gold bracelets and blue denim visible.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Fletching Watch Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The arrows my mother made were never meant to be kept. She fletched them in the cold yard behind the cooperage in Harrowmere, goose feathers bound with waxed thread, and every one left the bow to be lost in the marsh or the hill country beyond the river. I was twelve the summer I asked her why. She said a fletcher's work is the flight, not the quiver, and handed me the small knife.

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Years later the King's archers came through Harrowmere wanting a thousand shafts before the frost. Their captain, a thin man called Osric Vane, paid in silver and asked that every arrow be identical. I bound the feathers at the same slant, the nock cut so true it clicked against the string. My hands ached by the third night. He tested one against the gatepost, and it split the oak clean through.

On the morning they rode out, I found one shaft left on the bench, its feathers ragged, its head filed to a point too fine for war. I had made it for nobody, in the dark, to see whether I still could. I slid it into my belt and told myself it was for practice. The kingdom had no use for that arrow.

Forty winters on, I still bind the feathers at that slant. My granddaughter asks why the shaft in the glass case by the door has no scar on its head, no mark of a target struck. Because it was never aimed, I tell her. It only had to fly straight enough to be mine.