Traditional style colour tattoo of an arrow with two flowers and leaves, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow and flowers in traditional style

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A vertical arrow with a red flower and a teal flower stacked along its shaft, each with green leaves and black outlines. The feathered tail fades from dark brown to orange, and the arrowhead is shaded in the same tones. Bold black linework and flat colour fills give it a classic traditional look against plain skin.

Traditional Upper arm Arrow Flower Leaf Feather

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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

Nobody told me the arrows on the Teller Wash road were painted by hand until I was nineteen and holding the tin of ochre myself. My uncle Ray had done every one, a fresh arrow on a fence post each spring, pointing travellers off the washboard and onto the good road to Sayer's Well. He never let me touch the feathers. 'Feathers are for people who've earned them,' he said, and sent me to sand the posts.

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That June the rain came early and the wash ran brown for three days. When the water dropped, flowers had come up along the banks, a red one with five petals and a pale blue one with a dotted centre, both crowded with leaves. Ray stood at the edge of the wash with his cap in his hands and said the desert had been waiting a long time to show off. Then he sat down in the silt and didn't get up for an hour.

I finished the post he hadn't got to. I painted the shaft, then the red bloom stacked above the blue, then the arrowhead. When I came to the tail I used the brown from the bottom of the tin, thinning it toward orange as the light went, the way he'd shown me on a napkin years before. The sign pointed at nothing a map would show. Drivers still slow down at it, I'm told, and some turn off and never say why.