Close-up of a fine line black arrow tattoo with a feathered fletching and a diamond-shaped head, sitting on the side ribs below a blue lace bra.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line arrow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs diagonally across the skin, with a thin continuous shaft, a small open diamond-shaped head with dot accents along the shaft, and feathered fletching at the tail. The linework is delicate and uniform in black ink with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits low on the side of the torso, with the top edge of a blue lace bra framing the upper part of the photo.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Feather Diamond Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the end of the season the Grist and Dunning Travelling Show had one tent left standing, and a hole in its roof the size of a cartwheel. Old Tobiah Grist said the hole was the only honest thing the show had ever owned. Every evening for thirty years he had stood at the far end of the sawdust and shot a single arrow up through it, and every evening the crowd gasped as though he might miss, though he never had.

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His granddaughter Nell did not gasp. She had grown up on the ground beneath that arrow, sweeping sawdust and counting the gaps in the benches, and she wanted a road that led somewhere. One wet morning she found him whittling a shaft of ash by the stove. He had carved a small open diamond for the head, and along the length he pressed in dots with the point of a nail, one for each town the show had played. At the tail he bound three feathers from a pheasant hen his mother had kept. 'That's for the road,' he said. 'Take it with you, or leave it where it lands.'

The rest of the company drifted away that winter. The horses were sold, and the calliope was pawned in Leeds. In spring the landowner's men arrived with their measuring chains, and Nell stood in the empty ring with the arrow across her palm. She drew the bow he had left her and loosed. The shaft climbed through the old hole in the canvas, past the rafters, past the last swallows, and kept climbing until it was a thin black line against the moon.

The folk of the valley say the show never closed. On clear nights, if you count the dots along that line, you will find one more than the towns you know, and a girl at the far end of it, waiting for the crowd to settle before she takes her bow.