Colourful watercolour-style arrow tattoo with teal fletching and a grey tip, sitting on the side of the ribs below the arm.

Watercolour arrow on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A small arrow runs horizontally across the side of the ribcage, with teal fletching, a purple shaft and a silver-grey arrowhead. Soft pink, purple, blue and orange washes and splatters surround it, giving a painted, watercolour-like effect. The arrow is centred in the frame and the colours blend gently into the surrounding skin.

Ribs Arrow Watercolour Splatter Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the rain has finally stopped, so Father sent me up to the clearing with the last of the goose feathers and a tin of paint that Mrs Hallam swears she made from crushed foxgloves and spite. I have been dyeing fletching all week for the autumn shoot at Wenlow. The teal went on first, the colour of the mill pond on a clear morning, and the shafts I stained a deep violet because nobody else in the village would bother. Father says a plain arrow is a lazy arrow, so I thought I would make mine look like something that had been dipped in a sunset.

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At the shoot my first arrow wobbled off the string, struck the straw below the butts and burst open, spraying pink and orange across the grass like a dropped paint pot. The steward laughed until he had to sit down. Father did not laugh. He only said that a true shot goes where it is looking, and mine had clearly been looking at the trees. I took the next one slower, and it flew true enough, but the arrow I had lost kept gnawing at me. So after supper Ned and I took a lantern down the path into the beeches, following a trail of blue and violet flecks on the leaves like someone had left us breadcrumbs.

We found it at the old split oak where the path gives up. The shaft was buried to the fletching in the bark, the silver head bright as a fish under the lantern, and paint was still running down the trunk in soft streaks that the damp had turned into weather. A wren was sitting on the broken end of the wood, looking down at us as if we were the ones who had come in wrong.

I did not pull it out. Mrs Hallam says that anything painted in the wood belongs to the wood now, and I think she is right. Come up at Easter and see for yourself, though you will have to bring your own lantern. Love, Wren