Black and grey arrowhead tattoo with a bold outline and shaded fill on a forearm, with a dark rose tattoo above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrowhead tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded arrowhead sits on the inner forearm, with a notched tang and a cord or binding wrapped around its base. The bold black outline and grey shading give the arrowhead a textured, dimensional look, and small dark speckles add wear to the stone-like surface. A dark rose tattoo is partly visible at the top of the frame, and the design is photographed against white paper towels.

Traditional Blackwork Forearm Arrowhead Rose Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here has teeth and I am too old to shout over it. Under the third stone from the gate of Harrowmere Keep, a mason's girl called Elspeth Crane once knelt in the mortar dust and pulled out a flint point the length of her palm. It was black as a crow's wing, its edges notched like the back of a saw. The masons had been pulling down the old west tower that summer, and nobody had thought to tell the stones they were coming down.

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Tied to its base with a length of waxed cord was a loop of green binding, rotted to threads but still holding a knot. Elspeth took it to the steward, who said it was Roman or worse, and to the priest, who said it was the devil's, and to nobody at all for three days, because she had decided it was hers. She carried it in her apron pocket while she mixed the lime. At night she turned it over and felt the notches with her thumb, the way you would count beads, though she never said a prayer over it.

In the spring a bowman's grandson came up the valley road looking for work. When he saw the flint in her hand he went white and sat down on the wet grass. His grandfather, he said, had shot a royal stag with a point like that and had been ashamed of it ever after, because the hunt had cost him his right hand and his name. The cord, he said, had been his grandmother's, plaited from her own hair.

So Elspeth tied the point back on with fresh cord and set it in the gap where the tower had stood, beside the wild rose that had pushed its way up through the broken mortar. The grandson walked back down the valley without it. Whether he forgave her, I cannot tell you. The rose has been stubborn enough to outlive us all.