Black and grey tattoo of three arrows tied together with a cord on the upper arm, with grey shading on the fletching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows bound with cord on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of three arrows bundled together and bound with a cord that wraps around the shafts, with feathered fletching at the top and arrowheads at the base. Dark outlines and grey shading define the feathers, shafts and cord. The design is shown in black and grey on a bare upper arm against a pale, plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the lamp, it's not lit yet, so you'll have to take my word for the dark. Ask anyone on this headland where the bundle came from and they'll say a fool. They're not wrong. Old Ewan Pryde had the bow and the wind had the sea, and the Mary Dunn was on the Skerrow reef with her masts going like matchwood.

Keep reading

Ewan could hit a gull at two hundred paces with his eyes shut, but a gale takes the aim out of any man. So he did a thing his father had called madness. He took three arrows from the quiver, bound their shafts together with a length of tarred cord, and tied the far end to the lighthouse rail. One arrow alone would fly off true and fall short. Three, he reckoned, would carry each other's weight.

He drew it in the teeth of the wind, and the bundle went out over the water with a noise like tearing sailcloth. The first arrow fell into the surf. The second caught on a backstay. The third, the one with the cord still wrapped round its neck, dropped right across the Mary Dunn's deck at the feet of a boy called Hamish Lowe.

The boy hauled the cord in hand over hand, the crew hauled the rope after him, and by morning every soul was on the stones. The arrows are gone now, rotted and rusted, but the cord is still knotted to the rail, and you can see it there on the calm days, if you know where to look.

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