Close-up of a small fine line tattoo of an arrow pointing right across the side of a torso, in black ink, above a black skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line arrow on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, single-line arrow with a small fletched tail and a V-shaped head runs horizontally across the skin. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink is dark black. The tattoo sits centre-frame on bare skin between a navy crop top and a black skirt, with a black quilted bag strap crossing nearby.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The arrow came over the orchard wall the morning after the frost, when the apples were still green and nobody had thought to pick them. Mrs Ashdown found it lying across the rhubarb bed, its shaft straight as a plumb line and its head a neat V of iron that had not so much as bent on the stones. She pulled it free and carried it indoors like a dropped glove.

Keep reading

Her son Tom was a poor shot and proud of it. He had practised at the butts behind the church since Lent, and he swore the bow hanging in the kitchen was not his and that he had not drawn it in a month. She believed him only because he would not look at the arrow. He kept glancing at the window, where the garden ran in a long straight line to the gate, the way a thing runs when it has been aimed.

The next morning there was a second arrow, and then a third, each falling a little nearer the back door, each fletched with feathers she did not recognise. She went out with a basket and a pair of shears and cut every stem of the wild roses along that line, because her mother had told her that a path a thing takes is a path it will take again. By noon the bed was bare and the sky over the wall had gone the colour of pewter.

Tom found her there at dusk, sitting on the bench with the three arrows across her knees. He held out his hand for them. She gave him one and kept two, and said that whoever sent them had aimed well enough to reach the garden, and that she would wait to see whether they had aimed well enough to reach her. He laughed, and then he did not, because the gate was swinging open in the still air and nobody had touched it.