Black and grey flash sheet of arrow designs with feathered fletching and decorative shafts, drawn on aged paper, suitable as tattoo inspiration.

Arrow flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of hand-drawn arrow designs in various forms, including upright and diagonal arrows, one with a rope wrapped around the shaft, and simple outline arrows at the bottom. The arrowheads and fletching are shaded with pencil or ink hatching, while the shafts are single fine lines. The arrows are spaced across a cream, aged paper background.

Traditional Arrow Arrowhead Feather Rope

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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

The grey goose feathers came in brown paper parcels from a farm past Ashbourne, and Dad would not have a single one that wasn't barred cleanly. So on Saturdays I sorted them at the kitchen table while the Majestic's brass section tuned up through the wall. I could tell a left wing from a right by the curve of the quill before I could read my own name in joined-up writing.

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Tommy Oake came in on the third Saturday of March with his bow case under one arm and a cough he blamed on the dust from the hall. He wanted six shafts for the club's Whit Monday shoot, and he wanted them straight. I fitted the heads with pliers and a bit of sinew, then wrapped one shaft in hemp rope from the cellar, spiralling it three times round the middle so his fingers would know where to grip in the dark. He laughed and asked whether it was a love token. I said it was a rope, which it was, and he paid me in threepences.

On the Monday the wind came off the moor and every arrow on the line went wide except the roped one. It drove into the white of the bull and stood there quivering, its hatched fletching like the wings of a moth that had decided to stay. Tommy didn't pull it free for an hour. Across the yard the band was playing a slow foxtrot, and we could hear the boards creaking under the couples.

When the club finally took the target down, the rope had worn a pale ring into the shaft, exactly where his hand had rested. Dad hung it on the cloakroom hook at the Majestic, between a hat and a single dancing shoe, and it is still there, I'm told, though nobody remembers who put it up.