Pencil drawing of a fine line botanical tattoo design, with an arrow at each end and a lotus flower in the centre, held beside a hand holding a pencil.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and arrows vertical design sketch

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on white paper shows a vertical design with a feathered arrow at the top, a lotus flower in the centre and a pointed arrow at the bottom, joined by fine ornamental lines. Thin, delicate linework is combined with small stippled dots along the stem and around the lotus. The image is greyscale, and a hand holding a pencil sits at the left edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Arrow Lotus Flower Ornament Dot Pencil drawing Linework Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fletcher's boy had aimed at the hare three times before he hit the water instead, and the arrow went down into the black pool at the forest's edge without a sound. Oda stood on the bank with her hands in her apron and told him that a lost arrow is a debt the marsh keeps. He cried, and she let him, because crying was the honest thing to do with a debt.

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That spring the old women of Hallow End said a lotus had come up in the pool, which was madness, since nothing grew in that water but reed and frog. Yet there it was, pale and flat-petalled, rising on a stem as straight as a plumb line. Oda went down with the boy at dawn and saw the stalk was wound round with fine green thread, the way a fletcher binds the nock of a shaft. At the base, the tip of the lost arrow stood up out of the silt, its head bright as a fish's scale.

Nobody pulled the stem. The boy grew tall and took up the bow himself, and every year he went down to the water before the first frost to check the lotus was still there. He never shot at the marsh again. Some said the forest had kept his arrow to keep his hand steady. Oda said nothing about it, and when he asked her, she only tied a new feather to his quiver and told him to look after what he had been given.