Arrow tattoo on an upper arm with a grey shaded feather, a dotted shaft and a blue watercolour splash behind it.

Arrow and feather with blue watercolour splash

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded feather forms the fletching of an arrow, with a dotted shaft running to a grey diamond-shaped head. Behind the shaft sits a large blue watercolour-style splash, with smaller blue and pale turquoise droplets scattered across the skin. The shading on the feather and arrowhead is soft and greyscale, while the splash gives the piece a loose, painterly contrast.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Arrow Feather Watercolour splash Dot Diamond

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink pot tips just as the wind slams the lamp-room door, and you watch a blue bloom spread across the page you were writing to your brother. Before you can blot it, the drop has become a cloud, the colour of Gull Bay on a clear morning. You curse, then stop, because the fog is already pressing against the glass and the great lens is dark. Your father's lamp failed at dusk when a gull cracked a pane, and you have been trying to remember the signal code for the lifeboat ever since.

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You dig out the grey feather he kept in the tin with his tide tables. It still has the faint smell of pipe smoke. You pin it to the end of a broken rod, the way he taught you to fletch a practice arrow, and you lay the rod along the sill so its tip points past the reef toward the harbour. Then you dip the feather's quill into what is left of the ink and begin dots along the shaft of a message: short, long, short. Each one is a point of light the fog can carry.

The spray flying off the rocks keeps catching the glass, scattering pale specks across your sleeve and the sill. You do not wipe them off. Around three in the morning a flare answers from the water, then another, and you realise the crew has been steering by the splashes of blue and turquoise you thought you had ruined.

At first light you find the arrow still pointing where you set it. The boat is already nosing into the harbour mouth, and on your wrist a stain the shape of an arrowhead is drying in the cold air.