Traditional style tattoo of a bundle of red arrows tied with a rope, with red drops around it, on a calf, beside a partly visible pin-up tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red arrow bundle tied with rope on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bundle of red arrows with yellow shading and black outlines is tied at the centre with a red rope, with small red drops scattered around it. The bold, even linework and flat colour are typical of traditional American style, and the design is set on a lower leg. Partly visible at the edges are a dark lightning bolt tattoo on the left and a coloured pin-up woman's head on the right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodger in the back room left us six arrows and a length of tarred rope when he went out on the Tuesday tide, and Mrs Pell swore he would be back for them by Whitsun. I kept the arrows in the umbrella stand beside the front door, where the guests could see them and ask.

Keep reading

They were fletched in red, every one, the feathers cut sharp as flames, and he had bound them with a sailor's knot so tight that Dorothy spent a whole evening with a penknife trying to pick it loose. Nobody could say where he got them. Mr Hollis from the chandlery reckoned they had come off the shooting gallery on the pier, where a man once hit the bullseye and was paid in tuppenny rope.

Hollis came by in March with a pot of red paint and a grievance about the gutters. He stood in the hall looking at the stand and said a bundle tied like that is meant to be carried, not kept. You don't break it, he said. You untie it one arrow at a time and give each to someone who's going your way.

So I did. I pulled the rope free on a wet Thursday and walked down to the harbour wall with five arrows under my coat, and I left the sixth in the stand for whoever came back for the rest. The lodger's knot is still in my kitchen drawer, and the red spots on the hall tiles never quite came out.

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