Brown henna-style arrow designs with triangle and feather details running down a forearm and wrist, with the wearer's legs visible in the background.

Arrow designs on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Several arrows run down the inner forearm and wrist, drawn in thin brown lines with small triangular heads, feathered fletching, dots and short cross marks along the shafts. The linework is fine and even, with solid fill on some feathers and open outlines on others, and the single ink tone is a warm brown rather than black. The arrows are arranged in parallel diagonals across the forearm, with the wearer's hand raised at the top left and legs resting on dry grass below.

Geometric Forearm Arrow Feather Triangle Dot Henna

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent had holes in it the size of a man's fist, and Mossop's Travelling Wonder had not sold a ticket in Lincoln since the spring. Each evening old Ada Fenwick still stood at the chalk mark fourteen paces from the board and loosed her arrows one after another while the lamps guttered and the crowd, such as it was, drifted off towards the beer tent.

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Her cousin Jack kept the books and said the arrows were worth more as firewood. He counted them in the wagon: nine shafts, feathers bound with thread the colour of strong tea, each head cut from a triangle of tin. "Sell them to the scrap man at Boston," he said. Ada said nothing. She took the nine down and carried them out across the stubble, where the grass had gone yellow and brittle under the autumn sky.

That night a farmer's boy wandered in from the road, drawn by the lamps. Ada asked him to hold the lantern. She drew each arrow from the grass and laid them on the ground in a row, heads all pointing the same way, like the tracks of birds going home. The boy asked why she didn't shoot. "Nothing to hit," she said. "Only the way they go."

In the morning the wagons were gone, and Jack with them, but the boy found the arrows still standing in the field, upright, their shafts pushed deep into the stubble. The feathers had caught the dew and gone dark as walnut. The farmers said the field kept its arrows through every frost after that, and nobody was ever willing to pull them out.