Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow is drawn in black ink across the forearm, with a straight shaft ending in an arrowhead on the left and a feathered tail on the right. The linework is thin and even, with no shading. The photograph is black and white and cropped to the arm, with the subject's hair and shoulder visible behind it.

Fine line Forearm Arrow

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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

Ysolde the fletcher had three sons and one bow between them, so when the eldest rode south to the salt markets she gave him an arrow instead. It was ash, cut in the dark of the moon, its feathers bound with sinew from a grey mare. She did not blunt the head, and she did not tell him what it was for. She only said, "Lay it flat on any stone when you do not know the way, and let it choose."

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He thought it a fletcher's joke. He traded it at a crossroads inn for a loaf and a goat's cheese, then bought it back from the innkeeper's boy for two copper pins, because a man ought to keep something his mother made. Years passed. Salt wore his hands raw, and his name grew heavy with debts he could not remember incurring. When the snow came down on the high pass one winter, he had walked three days with no road under him and no star he trusted.

He found the arrow at the bottom of his pack, bent a little from the crossing. He laid it on a flat grey stone. For a long while it did nothing. Then the shaft turned, slow as a hand on a cold table, until the point lay towards the valley he had left, and the feathered tail lay across the snow like a line drawn with a finger.

He walked where it pointed. At the gate of the lower farm a lamp was burning in the window, and his mother stood in the doorway with a second arrow in her hand, its shaft still bare of feathers, as if she had been fletching all night.