Close-up of a fine line black arrow tattoo with leafy scrollwork on the upper back of a person with short dark hair.

Arrow with leafy scrollwork on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow with a fletched shaft and pointed head is centred on the upper back, with a symmetrical sprig of leaves and curling tendrils crossing horizontally behind it. The linework is thin and even, with small areas of shading in the leaves and fletching. The tattoo is shown in black ink on warm skin, photographed from behind with the subject's head and shoulders partly visible.

Fine line Botanical Back Arrow Leaves Foliage Scrollwork Tendril

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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

The rain has been coming sideways across the market since eight, and by eleven your cardboard is soft at the corners and the buckets of stock are standing in puddles you have stopped trying to avoid. You are packing the last of the bay leaves into paper when the man from the fletcher's stall two rows down ducks under your awning, shaking water off a canvas hat. He has a bundle under one arm wrapped in oilcloth, and he asks whether you still have any laurel, the good kind, the kind your mother used to dry on the back wall of the shop.

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You tell him the last bunch went on Thursday. He nods as if he expected it, then unwraps the oilcloth on your trestle anyway. Inside are three arrows with plain ash shafts and goose feathers gone the colour of weak tea. Their heads are bare, not yet bound. He says a customer ordered them for a wedding in Hebden Bridge, that the bride wants them hung over the door rather than shot, and that he has no idea what to wind round the shafts. He wants you to say which leaves belong with the feathers. You say bay, then holly, then ivy, and he laughs and says ivy is for the dead, and you say ivy is for things that won't leave, which is what weddings are for.

By the time the rain eases the stall is half empty and the arrows lie across your knees, each with a sprig of green thread wound round the nock. He pays you in coins that smell of the tin they were kept in. As he leaves, a single leaf slides from the wrapping onto the wet cobbles, and you pick it up and turn it in your fingers until the pigeons come down to see what you have.