Black and grey traditional tattoo of a flower with crossing arrows on a forearm, with other tattoos visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower and arrows on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A central flower with layered leaves sits over two crossing arrows, with solid black fills and grey shading. Bold outlines give it a classic, traditional look. Other tattoos, including a moth, appear higher up the arm against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Reverend Prior, forgive the smudged ink. The rain has come through the scriptorium roof again and I am writing this on the back of the Michaelmas accounts. Yesterday, while clearing the nettle bed below the east wall, my spade turned up a bundle of arrows wrapped in oilcloth, the shafts gone black with damp. Two of them still had their iron heads and their goose feathers, grey as old wool.

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Brother Osric, who was a huntsman before he took his vows, says they came from the bows the lord's men carried in the year the mill burned. He knelt beside me and tied the bundle up again without a word. Under the arrows was a small clay pot, and in it a root of the dark red rose that grows only on the ruined chapel steps. I did not know we still had it. I have set it in the good soil by the infirmary well, where the morning sun reaches first.

You said at chapter that we keep the things we cannot explain because God has not yet told us what they are for. The arrows lay point downward, toward the earth, and the rose was packed around them the way moss packs around a stone. I do not believe the two belong to the same story, but whoever buried them thought they did, and I find I cannot unsee it.

I have kept one arrow, though I have not told Osric. This morning the rose has three buds, and the largest has begun to open in the grey light. Please send word whether I may plant the others against the wall where the arrows lay. Your servant in Christ, Brother Anselm.

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