Black and grey ink drawing of an iris flower on an arrow shaft with a dashed triangle behind it, a botanical tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Iris and arrow tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed ink drawing of an iris bloom with its stem running diagonally into a feathered arrowhead at the lower left. Fine hatching and stippling define the petals, leaves and arrow, while faint dashed lines form a triangle behind the design. The drawing is in black and grey on a white sheet, with two pens placed across the lower corner.

Botanical Geometric Iris Flower Arrow Triangle Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Reed had walked the Scarrow levels for forty years with a bow over one shoulder and a surveyor's chain over the other, and when he went blind in the spring he handed the bow to Nell Harker, the miller's girl, and told her to shoot where the water ran deepest. She laughed at him. Nobody shot arrows across a fen. But the mere had swallowed two carts that winter and a boy from Holm Lane, and the parish wanted the channel marked before the autumn rains came down off the hills.

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Nell went out at first light with three barbed arrows wrapped in oilcloth. She loosed the first at a dead willow on the far bank and it stuck fast, feathers trembling. She tied a length of line to its shaft and hauled herself across on the reeds, and where the arrow had come down she found blue irises growing thick in a ring, their petals dark-veined and stiff as the wings of a heron. Tobias had once told her that irises only grew where the ground held firm underneath, and that a flower would always lean toward solid earth if you were patient enough to watch it.

She fired the other two, making a triangle of stakes across the open water, and walked the line with a pole. Each time her boots found mud that bore her weight. By noon the men of the parish stood on the bank with their caps in their hands, watching a girl pick a road through reeds that looked like nothing but water.

When she came back, Tobias asked whether the arrows had flown true. She said they had. He nodded slowly and said the flowers would do the rest, so she slung the bow across her back and went out again to see which way the irises were leaning.