Photograph of a black outlined arrow tattoo with a watercolour splash effect in teal, purple, pink, red, orange and yellow on skin.

Arrow with watercolour splashes

Mixed · Photo

A vertical arrow with a black outlined shaft, fletching at the top and an arrowhead at the bottom, is set against soft watercolour-style splashes of colour. The linework is bold and the black areas are filled solid, while the splashes fade and blend into the skin. The arrow sits centrally in a tall, narrow composition, with the colour bleeding outward from the shaft.

Arrow Arrowhead Fletching Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herald reaches the fletching sheds of Ostmere before the bells have finished ringing, sweating through his blue livery, and asks for one arrow only. The queen wants a single shaft sent north over the Hollin Ridge before the thaw. You have never made just one. You have feathered thousands for the palace guard, grey goose and barred hen, each trimmed to the same length as the last. Still, you take down the ash shaft that has been drying above the hearth since autumn.

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You bind the nock with waxed sinew and cut the fletching from three wing feathers you saved from a heron drowned in the millrace. Heron is wrong for war, your master says from the doorway, and you tell him the bird is not for war. Then you dip the arrowhead, a point of black chert knapped by your grandmother, into the pot of madder. The red runs out into the water in a slow bloom. You dip it again in woad, then in weld, watching the colours spread and soften like rain on a dry road.

The herald rides north at dusk with the arrow in a leather quiver. Three days later a rider returns with the queen's answer. The shaft struck the cliff at Gallow Pass, where the cold river forks, and wherever the point bit the stone, colour bled down the rock for a mile, violet and rust and gold. Nobody in the valley will explain it. Ask the millers, though. They will tell you the snow melted early that year, and that the river ran in a dozen shades all the way to the sea.