A small, fine line black arrow tattoo on the side of the ribs of a person lying on a white bed, wearing a white lace bra.

Small arrow tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person's torso lying on a white bed, with a hand resting on the hip and dark fabric at the left edge. A small, simple arrow sits on the side of the ribcage in thin, solid black linework with minimal shading. The warm skin tone, white lace and bedding make the black ink stand out in a soft, muted composition.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the presses at Ancoats ran late, Walter Dunn sent me back to the stone with a galley and a pencil. The proof had come up wrong. A lowercase r had slipped out of the word river and sat, scandalously, in the middle of an obituary. He had drawn the correction himself: a thin black arrow, shaft and barbed head, pointing left, the way a compositor marks a letter that needs to travel.

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I thought little of it then. I was nineteen and wanted the last tram home. But Walter drew that arrow in one unbroken stroke, without lifting the nib, and he told me once that the printer's arrow was the only honest mark on a page, because it never pretended the mistake was anything but a mistake. You point at it. You move it. You go home.

I took the galley down under the lamp, lifted the r with the tweezers and set it back where the river belonged. The ink was still tacky when I pulled the new proof, so I held it up to the bulb and watched the line settle, letter by letter, into what it had always meant to say.

Walter died the winter after. The proof is still in the drawer beside my bed, folded once and gone soft at the crease. The arrow is there in the margin, pointing at a word that is now correct, and some nights it is the only thing in the room pointing anywhere at all.