Fine line black arrow tattoo on the ribs of a person lifting a white knit jumper, with a hand and gold watch visible.

Small arrow tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black arrow runs horizontally across the side of the ribcage, with a thin shaft and a pointed head at the right end and feathered fletching at the left. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is a solid dark tone against light skin. The white knit jumper is lifted by a hand wearing a gold watch, and the plain white background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last night the Halloran Show pitched on Fenwick common, the big top had more darns than canvas, and Tomas still insisted on the archery. He stood at the far end of the ring with his cap pushed back, while I stood against the boards with an apple balanced on my head, because Ada had gone home to her mother in Ely and there was nobody else to hold it. Thirty people sat under the lights. Two of them were asleep.

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"Take it slow," he said, not to me but to the bow, the way he talked to everything he loved and didn't trust. He drew, and the arrow came out of the dark with a sound like a long breath, a single black line that did not wobble at all. It split the apple's stalk clean through and kept going, thudding into the board behind me so close my hair lifted. Nobody clapped. The man in the front row was counting coins into his palm for the bus.

Afterwards Tomas sat on the steps of the living wagon and turned the arrow over in his hands. "Feathers at the back," he said, "so it knows which way it's going." He had cut the head himself from a tin lid, filed to a point like a fish. The show had always been the arrow, he said, and the rest was just the crowd getting in the way. I told him the vans were sold on Friday. He nodded and whistled the dog up into the cab.

In the morning the wagon was gone, and the arrow was still stuck in the doorframe of the empty tent store at the height of my shoulder, pointing east towards the sea. I left it there. Each time I walk past I half expect it to still be in the air, moving slower than anyone can see.