Fine line tattoo of three arrows pointing right across the side of a ribcage, partly covered by a striped top.

Three arrows on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three thin arrows with small arrowheads sit horizontally across the side of the torso, one above the other, and point towards the right of the frame. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as a single dark tone against warm skin. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame, with a striped tank top and a black garment band at the edge of the image.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Teale had made the arrows for her daughter's wedding out of ash she'd been saving since her husband's last winter, and she set them on the kitchen table the night before with the fletching still tacky from the glue. Three shafts, straight as a rule, each capped with a small steel point her brother-in-law had filed down in his forge in Haworth. Nobody had asked her to make them. Nobody had needed to.

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Her daughter, Nell, came in from the yard with flour on her cheek and stood over the table without touching anything. "They're for the ceremony?" she said. "Dad's cousin wants to do a reading about the bow."

"Not the bow," Mags said. "The bundle."

She told it the old way, as her own mother had told it to her in the same room: one arrow snaps in a child's hand, but three bound together will bear a man's whole weight. Nell rolled her eyes, then didn't, because she was looking at how her mother had wrapped the shafts with waxed thread at the nock end, tight and even, a single dark line where the wood met the sinew.

They were married at noon under the chapel yew. The wind came off the moor and tugged at the ribbons, and the vicar lost his place twice. Afterwards, while the cake was being cut and the dogs had got under the trestles, Mags found the arrows leaning against the chapel gate, unbound. The thread lay on the step in a neat coil, and Nell had pulled one shaft free and laid it crosswise on the stone, as if making a point nobody had asked for. Mags picked up the coil and began to wind it back, one turn at a time, until the three of them lay together again and the wood held.