Black and white photo of a small, fine line arrow tattoo pointing right on the side of the ribs.

Small arrow tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow pointing right is tattooed on the side of the ribcage against bare skin. The arrow has a thin shaft, a simple arrowhead and feathered fletching drawn in fine black linework with no shading. The black and white photograph is framed close on the torso, with a pale fabric edge at the top left and soft bedding at the sides.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Marr had been fletching arrows for the archers of Caddon Fell for thirty-one years, and she knew the weight of goose wing the way other women knew the weight of a loaf. On the morning the tithe carts came up the valley road, she was still gluing feathers to a shaft when her grandson Tam came in without knocking, mud to the knees, clutching a hawk's bell that was not his.

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"Where's it going?" he asked, turning the bell over in his fingers. She told him nothing went anywhere unless somebody made it fly. She took a thin ash shaft from the rack, scraped it smooth with a blade worn to a crescent, and bound three grey feathers at the nock with waxed linen. Then she drew a barbed head from a tin of old nails and seated it with a single tap of the hammer, as if she were closing a letter.

"That one is for the steward," she said. "He counts the grain twice and writes it down once." Tam looked at the arrow, then at the window, where the carts were grinding up past the mill. The steward had been sending men to the upper farms for a month, taking a sheaf from every family who could not read his ledger.

She did not fire it. She laid it across two pegs above the door, head pointing east along the road the carts would take going home, and told Tam to take the bell back to the boy at the kennel. He went out slowly, looking back once. By dusk the arrow was still there, and the carts had turned around at the bridge, empty, because the men driving them had seen which way the shaft was pointing and had decided the road was not worth the walk.