Solid black silhouette drawing of an arrow with three hanging feathers and beaded cords on a white background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow and feathers silhouette design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of an arrow runs diagonally across the image, with a fletched tail at the left and a barbed head at the right. Three long feathers hang from the centre on beaded cords, with fine lines suggesting the feather barbs. The image uses flat black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Arrow Feather Bead Cord Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goose had been dead two days when Maud finally let me strip the wing. Her hands were too stiff for the close work now, so she sat on an upturned crate with her tea going cold, watching me split the quill with a bone folder the way she had once shown me, and telling me I was pressing too hard.

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The order had come up from the big house at Calder Edge: two dozen flights for the autumn shoot, grey goose, barred to the tip, wanted by the end of the week. We worked through the nights with the lamp hung from the rafter on a length of cord. Maud threaded glass beads onto sinew for three arrows that would not go to the house. She said they were for the hall wall, hung where the damp could not reach them, and she made me swear not to tell the steward which ones they were.

On the last night she took a barbed head from the tin, turned it under the light, and set it down unpainted. I asked why she had not notched it like the others. She said an arrow leaves the bow already knowing where it means to land, and the feathers only keep it honest on the way. Then she bound three feathers together at the shaft with waxed thread, let the beaded cords fall loose, and hung the whole thing from the nail above the bench.

In the morning the wind came through the open door and the feathers swung slowly, all three together, like a plumb line finding the true floor. Maud was asleep in her chair with one hand still resting on the tin. I left the arrow where it hung and went out to load the cart, and I did not touch it again until the day they carried her down the valley road.