Black and grey fine line script reading love yourself, with a thin arrow and small heart below it, tattooed on the inner forearm.

Love yourself script with arrow on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a forearm with the words love yourself written in cursive script above a thin arrow. A small solid heart sits on the arrow's shaft. The linework is fine and even, filled in solid black with no shading, and the pale skin is evenly lit against a light background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Arrow Heart Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Master Corvin never let anyone touch a bowstring before he had looked at their hands, and he looked at mine for a long time the morning I came to the workshop off the Ostian road. Hands are honest, he said, they tell you what the mouth is too proud to. He gave me a bundle of ash shafts and a knife with a worn bone grip, and told me to make straight arrows or make none.

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For three winters I made nothing but straight arrows. I learned to feather them with goose quill, to bind the nocks with sinew, to sight down each shaft against the window until it stopped wobbling. Corvin would roll them across his table and kick the crooked ones into the ash bin without a word. The spring I finished my first proper batch, he weighed one on his palm for a long moment and then, to my surprise, set it in the rack with the others.

Somewhere in the second year I began cutting a small heart into the shaft just behind the head, where no archer would ever see it unless the arrow had already found its mark. Corvin noticed on the day Lucia came in for a dozen for her brother's hunting trip. She watched me sand the wood and asked why the heart was so small. I told her the truth, that it was a poor joke and I had no better one. She laughed, paid in copper, and carried the bundle out into the market under her arm.

That evening Corvin found me still at the bench with the lamp guttering. He took the knife from my hand, cut three words into a fresh shaft in letters so fine they could barely be read, and pushed it back across the wood. Make the arrow say what you mean, he said, then let it fly. I kept that shaft. It still hangs on the wall above my bench, and the words are still there if you hold it to the window.