Traditional style tattoo of a grey arrowhead with a red tip, wrapped in teal and orange bands, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrowhead with coloured binding on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold arrowhead sits upright in the centre of the frame, shaded in grey and black with lighter highlights along its facets. A red tip sits at the top, and teal and orange bands wrap around the middle and base. Thick black outlines and a plain dark background make the design stand out against the skin.

Traditional Forearm Arrowhead Arrow Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the flint came out of a biscuit tin in Mr Pell's caravan, wrapped in a Sunday supplement. Eleven points, grey as wet slate, each one knocked from river stone by a man who had long since stopped answering letters. Nobody buys arrowheads at the back of a fairground, Dad said, so I sat on the caravan step with a pot of waxed linen and started binding them anyway.

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Teal first, because Mrs Pell swore it was her lucky colour, and she had died in March still swearing it. Then orange, pulled tight around the shaft so the cord bit into my thumb. The red I saved for the tip, dipped in sealing wax the way the old archers did when they wanted a shaft seen across a field. The big top had gone to auction in Spalding. The ring was a patch of trodden grass by the rail yard, and the lions had been sold to a zoo in Denmark.

On the last night the archery act was meant to be Ivo, who could split a playing card at thirty paces. He had gone to work on the Humber docks in April. So the ticket-seller's boy, all of nine, stood where Ivo used to stand with a bow longer than himself, and I handed him the first point.

He drew back and let go. The arrow went wide into the dark and struck the tarmac of the lorry park with a clean, skittering sound, then nothing. Somebody shouted from the caravans. The boy grinned at me as if he had meant it all along, and I thought, I'll bind the rest tomorrow.