Fine line arrow tattoo in dark ink on the side of a woman's ribcage, below a navy tank top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, thin arrow with a pointed head and feathered fletching runs horizontally across the skin of the ribcage. The linework is delicate and even, and the ink is a dark blue-black with no shading. The pale skin and navy top fill the frame, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the image.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

Find an artist for this

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

Hold still, the lot of you, and mind the lamp. No, Tobias, the other lamp. Right. The arrow. Every fletcher in Bristol knew the trick of it, and old Jem Harrow had it best of all. He sat at his bench by the quay with goose feathers in a jar and ink so thin you could see the grain of the wood through it, and he told anyone who would listen that a shaft only flew true if you gave it a straight back and a clean head.

Keep reading

The Marian left Avonmouth in the spring with a hold full of salt cod and a boy named Ned Carrow on the rail, sixteen years old and certain he would be a captain by Lisbon. Forty days out the wind died and the water went flat as a plate. Ned had nothing to do but watch the horizon and count gulls that weren't there. The mate kept a long yew bow in his locker that he never touched, and one evening Ned asked to try it on a bottle bobbing off the stern. The shaft went wide. Ned laughed so hard he fell against the capstan.

After that he would not leave the bow alone. He practised with a rope's end and a bucket, and by the Canaries he could split a belaying pin at twenty paces. He never got his captaincy. What he got instead was a single arrow inked across his ribs by the bosun, drawn by lamplight with a needle and a little soot, so that he would always know which way he was pointing.

The bosun never said where the arrow was meant to go. That was Ned's business. He worked it out off the Azores, the morning the fog lifted and there, low and grey on the rim of the sea, was the coast of Portugal, dead ahead.