Fine line black arrow tattoo with a feathered head and diamond point running down the forearm of a person reading a book.

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black line arrow runs down the inner forearm, with a diamond-shaped point at the top and a chevron-feathered fletching at the bottom. Two curved bands cross the shaft near the middle, and small dots sit beside the design. The ink is a dark grey-black on brown skin, photographed outdoors with the arm resting on a pair of jeans.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp had got into the glue again, so the feathers on the last dozen shafts lifted at their tips like cats' ears, and Mr Hollis would not take them at the Bell until every one lay flat. I sat at the bench by the window with the lamp turned low and a cup of cold tea at my elbow, working goose quills into their grooves while Mrs Pardoe read aloud from a borrowed novel by the fire. She paused whenever I swore, and went on only when a shaft was bound with three tight turns of waxed linen.

Keep reading

Father taught me that the binding was for the hand and not the eye. A man should find the balance of an arrow in the dark with his thumb alone. The head was the other matter. I had cut the diamond narrow, as narrow as I dared, because Thomas Ridley drew a bow heavier than any in the parish and would not thank me for a broad point that caught the air and wandered. He had asked for one arrow only, for the autumn shoot, and had paid for it in advance with a shilling he could ill spare.

On the day, the wind came off the downs in short hard gusts. He loosed it at a hundred yards and it rose, hung, and dropped into the gold with a sound like a slammed door. Thomas came back red from the cold, grinning, and said the binding was a fraud, for he had felt the true centre through the linen before he ever nocked it. I told him that was exactly what it was meant to do.

That evening the arrow was back on my bench, though I had not seen him bring it. Someone had wrapped a torn page around the shaft beneath the third turn of linen, with one line underlined in pencil, a line I had read aloud myself that winter by the fire without thinking of anything but the words. I did not take the page off. I set the arrow in the rack with the others and left the lamp burning until morning.

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