Two forearms: a fine line black arrow with leaf-shaped fletching on the left forearm, and a dotwork mandala on the right forearm, both in black ink.

Arrow and mandala on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two forearms with black tattoos. On the left, a slim arrow runs downwards with three leaf-like feathers at the top and a diamond-shaped head at the bottom, drawn in fine, even linework. On the right, a symmetrical mandala with an eight-petalled outer edge is built from dense dots and fine lines, with diamond and triangle motifs in the centre.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Arrow Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard wall at Hollin Cross had a gap in it the width of a man's shoulders, and through that gap the old archer's daughter used to shoot apples down off the high boughs for the village children. Her father had made the bow from ash that grew by the beck, and he had made the arrows too, each one fletched with three feathers cut from a jay's wing and bound with waxed thread. He said a true arrow flies straight because it has been given something to lean on, and that was the whole of his teaching.

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One late August the children came over the wall to find the apples on the ground already, split and wasp-eaten, and no one had taken them. Only a single arrow lay in the grass under the medlar tree, its head a small dark diamond of iron, and wound round its shaft was a band of wool with a pattern worked into it, rings within rings, eight points like the petals of a flower opening at the edge. Nobody in the village had woven such a thing. The old women looked at it a long time and would not say what they thought.

The daughter took the arrow home and laid it on the table beside her father's bow. In the morning the wool had unwound a finger's width, and the pattern under it was new, a circle of tiny squares and triangles that had not been there before. She understood then that the arrow had come looking for someone to finish it. She sat up that night with a needle and a pot of soot-black ink, drawing the next ring by candle, and when the wool was done the arrow went out of the window and did not come back, and the apples on the high boughs were left for the birds.