Black and grey fine line tattoo of three arrows wrapping around the forearm as a band, with cursive lettering partly visible above.

Arrow band around a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A band of three arrows runs around the forearm, each arrow drawn with a thin outline and fine hatched feather fletching. The shafts form two continuous lines that wrap across the skin, and the arrowheads point to the right. Only black ink and grey shading appear, against pale skin and a blurred background, with partial cursive lettering tattooed at the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Feather Band Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roof went first, the winter after my father died, and the rain came straight down into the great hall where the Harlow men used to eat their mutton. I moved my bench under the one arch that still held and kept my knife and my pot of glue there, because a fletcher needs a dry corner more than a lord needs a hall.

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Sir Edmund's steward came up the hill in March asking for shafts. The town was short of bowmen and shorter of patience. I told him I would make the arrows if he brought me goose feathers that had not been pulled from the dead, and he laughed, but he brought them. Three dozen, grey and white, folded in a sack that smelled of the marsh.

I cut each shaft from ash I had dried a full year and fletched them in threes, turning the feathers the way my father taught me so they would spin true. When the glue set I bound a thin wrap of tarred linen around each bundle, just above the nock, so the three arrows lay together like a fence rail. The steward asked why. I said a single arrow breaks in a fist, but a bundle carries.

On the last morning the men marched out under the gate with their heads down, the arrowheads all turned toward the river road. I watched from the arch until the last of them was a dot on the causeway. Then I went back to the bench, cut the linen from one bundle, tied it again tighter, and hung it on the arch where the rain could not reach. Someone would need it, and I did not intend to be the one who asked why.