Black and grey arrow tattoo running along the inside of a forearm, with feathered fletching on the left and a shaded arrowhead on the right.

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an arrow runs the length of a forearm, with detailed feather fletching at the back and a shaded arrowhead with a banded shaft at the front. The linework is crisp and the feathers use grey shading to show depth. The background is blurred, with a partial view of a person's ear at the right edge.

Forearm Arrow Feather Arrowhead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman's daughter on the Ouse had a bow her father made from ash and yew, and she could put a shaft through a moorhen at forty paces when the mist was still on the water. The barge families upriver said she would marry the first man who could outshoot her, and so for three summers the young men came with their own bows and went home with wet sleeves and nothing else.

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The fourth summer a stranger came off a timber barge at Naburn lock with no bow at all, only a long grey arrow wrapped in oilcloth. He said it had been his grandmother's and that she had made it for a man who never came back from the fens. The ferryman's daughter laughed at him and asked where his bow was. He said the arrow did not need one, only a steady hand and a reason to fly.

She took it to the bank at dawn and fitted it to her own string. The feathers were grey at the tips where they had been handled and dark at the root, and the head was a leaf of hammered iron, banded where it met the shaft with a ring of brass worn smooth. When she drew it, the fletching sat against her cheek like something breathing. She loosed it at the far willow, and it went out over the water without a sound, and it did not come down. The river was quiet for a long time after that. Her father said it was still in the air somewhere over Acaster, and that anyone who went looking for it would find the stranger's barge gone and the lock keeper with no memory of him at all.