Fine line black arrow tattoo with geometric triangular arrowheads on the side of the ribs, beside a light speckled tank top.

Small arrow tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow runs horizontally across the skin, with a fine single-line shaft and triangular arrowheads at each end and a small notched fletching near the tail. The linework is thin and crisp, shaded in black and grey with no colour. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against warm skin, with the edge of a pale speckled tank top in the lower part of the image.

Fine line Geometric Ribs Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shaft had to run true, Hester said, straight as a Lenten sermon, and the boy had brought her one that bowed like a bad alibi. She set it on the bench under the window and sighted down it with one eye shut. Outside, rain came sideways off the Teme and rattled the shutters of the fletching shed, and the room smelt of hot glue and ash. "Again," she said.

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He planed it through the afternoon while she split goose feathers from the Bromfield flock, trimming each to a neat swept curve and notching the base so the glue would bite. The heads were the part he loved. Hester let him file the barbs himself, two small triangles of cold iron, and made him hold each one up to the lamp to check the edges caught the light. "A head should look as if it means to go somewhere," she said. "Otherwise it is just a nail with ambitions."

By dusk the arrow was finished, fine as a pencil line on slate. Tom Bradwell, the bailiff's son, had been calling all month to buy a dozen for the butts, and tonight he stamped in with rain dripping off his hat to collect them. Hester gave him the box and kept back the thin one with the notched fletching. "That one isn't for sale," she said. "It's for whoever you've wronged."

Tom never came back for it, and the arrow hung on a nail above the bench for forty years, shaft still straight, barbs still sharp, while the boy grew up to be a magistrate and the shed grew a second roof. Each spring Hester dusted it and sighted down it with one eye shut, and each spring it was still true.