Black and grey fine line arrow tattoo with a geometric spearhead and feathered fletching on 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 spearhead at the top and a feathered tail at the bottom. The linework is clean and even, with small tick marks and dots along the shaft and open, hatched detail in the feathers. The photograph is black and white, with a dark knit sleeve at the top left and a soft grey background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goose feathers had gone grey with damp, so Mabel sent me into the beech wood with a basket and a bone knife and told me not to come back to the village until I had a hawk's flight feather, the stiff brown one from the left wing. She said the hawk would drop one if I waited long enough, and that patience was the only fletching tool that never needed sharpening.

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I found the feather at the foot of a split oak where the leaf litter was thick and dark. It was still perfect, every barb locked to its neighbour, and I held it to the light the way Mabel had taught me, checking the curve. Back at the cottage she had already cut the shaft from a length of hazel and set the iron point she had been saving since her husband died. It was a diamond of blackened metal, narrow as a fish's eye. She notched the wood in small ticks below the head, one for every winter she had kept the forge fire going, and dotted the line between them with the tip of a hot awl.

The lord's huntsman came through the village that week, asking for a bowman who could take a buck at two hundred paces. Tobias the carter's son put his best arrow into the dark trees and it did not come down. We walked the whole edge of the wood looking for it. We found it at dusk, standing upright in the hollow of a stump, the feather still whole and the iron point clean, as if someone had set it there on purpose.

Mabel turned it over in her hands and said nothing for a long time. Then she handed it back to me and told me to take it to the lord's house myself. I did not understand until I was halfway up the hill that she had never once asked me whose feather it was.