Close view of a fine line tattoo of three red arrows pointing in the same direction, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Three thin red arrows, each with a pointed head and feathered tail, run horizontally across the skin of the side ribs. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the ink is a single shade of red. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame against a striped tank top, with a dark band beneath it and a light sofa and brick wall in the background.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, for the wind up here has teeth, and I will not tell this twice. See the broken arch above the well? That was the north tower of Carrow, and under it lived a fletcher called Oswin Pell, who had three sons and one bad knee. When the boys rode off to the border wars, he sat in his workshop with a bundle of goose feathers and a sheaf of ash, and he made them three arrows, each one different, so no man could say whose was whose.

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The eldest's head was filed to a point like a thorn. The middle son's shaft was bound with blue thread at the nock. The youngest's fletching he cut so fine that the old man had to hold it to the candle to see it at all. Oswin swore that if the three ever flew true together off one string, the boys would come home by the same road, and the three of them would sit down to supper with their boots off.

The road did not bring them home together, nor by any road at all. The eldest's arrow came back in a winter cart, its head snapped off at the shaft. The middle son's was found in the ford below the mill, still nocked, and the youngest's stuck in the bell rope of the chapel, where the ringer swore it rang the bell once, low and clean, on the day of the funeral.

Oswin kept the three in the sill of the north window, pointing west, and he never once moved them. Each evening he sat with his bad knee to the wall and waited for a sound that was not coming. So when the wind comes through that broken arch and you hear a thin singing in the stone, do not go looking. That is only the old fletcher, still waiting for someone to pull the string.