Fine line tattoo of three red arrows on the side of the ribs, photographed with the arm raised beside a striped top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Three thin red arrows point in the same direction across the side of the torso, just below the underarm. The linework is fine and even, with simple shafts, arrowheads and small fletching, and the ink is a single flat red with no shading. A black band sits below the arrows, and a striped tank top and a white sofa fill the rest of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog rolled in off the Haven before the tide had turned, and by the time my father reached the end of the quay the Susannah Vey was only a lantern somewhere out on the Scar, her crew calling to us through the murk. He did not stop to tie the line to his belt. He nocked the first arrow, a plain ash shaft with a tarred cord looped behind its head, and drew to his ear the way he always did, as if the wind were a man he had known for years.

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The first arrow dropped short and sank with a hiss. The second skated over the mast and fouled in the rigging, and I heard someone out there swear, which meant someone was alive. My father reached back without looking and I put the third into his hand. I had made all three that winter at the bench in our back room, binding the fletching myself with red-dyed goose feather because it was all the chandler had, and I had argued with him about the cord until he gave in. Keep them short, he had told me, and point them all one way, so a man in the water knows which end to grab.

The third arrow went high and true. It trailed its rope across the black water, a hand caught it, then another, and by dawn a bosun's chair was running back and forth on the hawser between the wreck and the harbour wall, carrying the crew one at a time into the grey.

My father never said much about it afterwards. He hung the spare shafts on pegs above the bench, three to a row, their red fletching all turned toward the door. When I asked him why, he only shrugged and said he liked something in the workshop that always pointed home.