Black ink arrow tattoo with a detailed arrowhead and feathered fletching across a man's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink arrow runs horizontally across the forearm, with a shaded triangular arrowhead on the left and feathered fletching on the right. The shaft has a wrapped, twisted detail along its length. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a grey shirt sleeve, with the person's face and head cropped out of frame.

Forearm Arrow Arrowhead Feather Fletching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Sallow Ford asked the carter what he was carrying. Salt, said the carter. The guard said salt paid no toll worth the name, and the carter, who had heard this at every crossing since the thaw, pulled back the sacking. Underneath lay an arrow as long as a man's forearm. Its shaft was wound with twisted cord, its head a dark triangle shaded like a shadow on water, and its fletching was feathered in fine stripes.

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The guard had been a fletcher's boy once and knew the work. Who made this? he asked. My sister Ilse, at the mill house under the east hill, said the carter. She makes one every year and shoots it at the boundary stone, so the land remembers whose it is. This year the wind took it over the ridge, and I have walked it back to her.

Across how many kingdoms? the guard asked. Two, said the carter. The third one never counted anything it could not tax.

The guard turned the shaft in his hands. The cord was tight and even, the feathers sound, the head true. He weighed the arrow, then the carter's purse, then the grey sky over the water. At last he said that a thing which had flown so far had paid its own toll, and he waved the wagon through. Ilse was waiting at the stone with her bow across her back. She took the arrow without a word, ran her thumb down the feathers, and pressed it point first into the turf beside the stone. The ground keeps what it is given, she said. Next year I will shoot a longer one.