Black fine-line tattoo of three arrows above the words for you, a thousand times over, on an upper arm.

Three arrows and a quote on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three black arrows run horizontally across the top, two pointing right and one pointing left, drawn with thin, even linework and simple solid arrowheads. Below them, the words for you, a thousand times over are set in a bold serif typeface in solid black ink. The design sits centrally on a pale, smooth area of skin against a soft, slightly warm background.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Arrow Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gorge at Harrow Pass was too wide for a voice to carry, so the two households spoke with bows. Each morning the eldest daughter of the upper farm tied a strip of wool to a shaft and loosed it at the far bank, where the boy from the lower terraces waited with his hand raised. Most days the arrows said little: rain coming, the ewes lambing early, a bone for the dog. Nobody on either side could read, so the knots in the wool were the words, and the old men argued over what each one meant.

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Then one autumn the far bank stayed empty. Three mornings she loosed her arrows into the grey and got nothing back. On the fourth, a shaft came skittering across the stones at her feet, its wool bound with a single knot pulled tight. She untied it slowly. Under the knot was a scrap of his mother's linen, and on it, scratched with a nail, a mark that the old men later agreed meant the leg was broken and the scree too steep to climb.

She did not wait for a reply. She cut three new shafts from the ash by the byre, bound each with three knots, and sent them one after another across the water, the first flying toward him, the second flying back the way it came, and the third falling short and raising a spray that made him laugh. By dusk there were a hundred arrows in the shallows and the old men were shaking their heads. She sent a thousand before the moon rose, and every one carried the same knot, tied tight enough to hold until it reached him.