Small black fine line arrow tattoo with feathered fletching on the inner forearm of a person with long blonde hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow tattoo on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black arrow tattoo on the inner forearm, with the arrow pointing left and its fletching drawn as layered feather shapes. The linework is clean and solid black with no shading, and the skin tone is light against a blurred background. The composition crops the head out of frame and centres the arm, with a grey top and a denim jacket visible behind it.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Feather

Find an artist for this

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 arrow on the bow pointed back the way we had come, which was the first thing my mother noticed when she stepped off the towpath at Merrow Lock. I had painted it myself in April, a black shaft and a fletching of layered feathers, and I had been proud of it until she said a boat should always point the way it is going.

Keep reading

We were carrying a load of slate for a churchyard wall in Thame, and the lock keeper had already docked us a day for the low water. My father had given me the barge the winter he stopped being able to lift the top gate. He never liked the paint. He said arrows were for hunters and this was a working boat, but every evening he sat on the roof and watched that left-facing point as if it were a compass he had forgotten how to read.

On the third morning the mist lifted off the cut and a heron stood on the lock beam, perfectly still, looking at the arrow as though it had come to collect something. I told my mother it was a sign. She told me herons were only hungry. We both knew we were really talking about my father, who had heard our voices and come up the steps in his slippers.

He looked at the bow for a long time. Then he took the brush from his coat pocket, dipped it in the tin of black, and added a second row of feathers along the shaft, so the arrow still pointed backwards but looked, he said, as if it meant it. We went on with the slate, and nobody mentioned the direction again.