Black and grey blackwork arrow tattoo running down the inner forearm, shown in a two-panel photo with a close-up of the design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image has two panels. The left shows a man's arm with a small arrow tattoo on the forearm, pointing down towards the wrist, with an open hand and a printed white T-shirt visible. The right is a close-up of the same arrow, with solid black fletching, a shaft and a filled arrowhead, and fine stippled shading on the feathers. The arrow is drawn in black and grey on a plain, darkened background.

Blackwork Forearm Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hesk the fletcher had cut eleven shafts from the ash by the weir before he noticed that the twelfth had grown crooked in the drying rack, bent like a question mark that would not straighten. He could have burned it for kindling. Instead he carried it to his bench and worked the wood with his thumbs until the bend ran true, then fitted three grey goose quills flat along its length. He spent the whole of a morning dotting the edges of the feathers with a bone point and rubbing in soot, so the black sat in them like rain in cloth.

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The iron head he forged from bog ore and filled with lead, which his father had told him was foolish, since a hollow head flies truer. Corran, the reeve's son, rode up in the frost and asked for it for the autumn hunt. Hesk said it was not for hunting. Corran asked what it was for, and Hesk said it was for the one who would one day come to his door asking which road went to the sea, and that the arrow would show him the way by lying still.

The reeve's men came in the thaw, when the causeway was under water and the marsh had swallowed two carts. They found the fletcher's cottage dark and the arrow hanging above the lintel, point down, its shadow lying across the threshold. They tried to take it and could not lift it from its hook. An arrow never loosed, Hesk had told them from his chair, has no road of its own, and whoever carries it must go where it points. The men stood a long time in the doorway, and then one by one they stepped over the black shadow of its head and went home by the long way round.