Black and grey arrow tattoo with feathered fletching running along a man's forearm, with a tank top and a cassette tape print visible behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey arrow runs horizontally along the forearm, with a detailed arrowhead at the left and feathered fletching at the right. The shaft has small dotted and banded decoration, and the shading gives the arrow a slightly three-dimensional look. The photo is taken at an angle from the side, with the arm filling most of the frame and a dark tank top with a cassette tape print in the background.

Forearm Arrow Arrowhead Feather Fletching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the fortieth day south of the Line the men had stopped asking what you were whittling. The Margery Lowe had lain becalmed off the Horn longer than anyone liked, and Mr Tully, the carpenter, had given you a length of seasoned ash in exchange for mending his sea chest. You worked it on the forward hatch in the afternoons, when the watch below slept and the light came flat and grey over the water.

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The head was the hard part. You cut it from an iron hoop the cooper had thrown out, filed the barbs until they were sharp enough to shave with, then pierced a row of dots along the shaft with a sail needle heated in the galley fire. Mr Tully said a shaft wanted banding or it would split in the cold, so you banded it, three rings of notches no thicker than cord. When the fletching came, you took it from a gull that had landed on the rigging one dawn and, to everyone's surprise, let itself be caught.

The wind came round on the forty-first morning. The mate asked what the arrow was for, and you told him you meant to loose it north and the breeze would follow. He laughed, then fell quiet, because the crew had already lost two boys to the ice that voyage and nobody aboard liked talk of signs. You kept your mouth shut and your hands busy.

That night you lashed the arrow to the taffrail with tarred twine, head pointing back the way the ship had come, toward Dundee and your mother's kitchen. When the sails finally filled, the feathers lifted and settled, lifted and settled, and you let it point the only way you could see.