Black and grey fine line arrow tattoo with a diamond head and feathered fletching running along the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black arrow runs along the inner forearm, with a diamond-shaped head at the top, a single-line shaft broken by small dots and bars, and feathered fletching at the bottom. The linework is fine and even, and the tattoo is set against pale skin with a dark knitted sleeve at the top of the frame. The image is black and white, with the arrow placed diagonally through the centre of the composition.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Feather

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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 fletcher's shop smelled of goose fat and wet ash, and my father would not let me touch the good feathers until I could tell a left wing from a right by touch alone. I was eleven when I learned it. He sat me on the low stool by the river door and gave me a shaft of seasoned ash, straight as a measuring rod, and a bone scraper no longer than my hand.

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Every shaft needed its notches, a small cut behind the head where the sinew would bite, and then the wraps, so many turns of thread that the wood looked dotted from a distance. My father said an arrow carried the mark of whoever made it, the same way a spoon carries the hand that carved it. So I cut my own mark, a pair of short bars below the flint head, and he pretended not to notice when I did it crooked.

The winter the river froze, the chieftain's men came for twelve arrows for the boar hunt. I bound each head with pine pitch and fixed three grey goose feathers to every tail, turning them the way I had been taught, so the arrow would spin true. My father ran his thumb down every shaft and found one wobbling. He did not find a single mark that was wrong.

At the hunt I stood at the edge of the birch trees and watched the first arrow leave the bow. The feathers caught the low sun and turned like the spokes of a wheel until the shaft was gone into the grey air. When the men came back that evening, one of them handed me the arrow back. My two bars were still on the wood, dry and unbroken.