A single blue ink drawing of a long arrow with a feathered tail on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Blue ink arrow design

Colour · Flash

A tall, slender arrow runs vertically down the centre of the page, with a pointed head at the top and a layered, feathered fletching at the base. The linework is loose and painterly, with the shaft built from streaky wash and darker ink along the fletching. The arrow is rendered in a single deep blue ink against a pale, empty background.

Arrow Feather Fletching Design

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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 name badge still says Hollis Park Year Eleven, although someone has written your surname over the top in biro, spelled wrong, and you let it stay that way. Across the hall the buffet table has begun to sag under sausage rolls nobody will admit to buying. You have been holding the same warm glass of cava for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to mention the archery club, because nobody else seems inclined to.

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Then Dani Ferris is at your elbow, older and louder, saying you still owe her a fiver from the 2003 raffle. She tells you Mr Okonedo kept your arrow. The blue one, with the fletching you cut from a wing your dad found on the allotment. It hung on the corkboard in the sports hall for years, the points of the others pinned around it, until the building was condemned and everything went into a skip. You say you don't remember. You remember exactly: the shaft dyed with your dad's indigo, the streaky look of it while the ink was still wet, the way the head never sat quite true.

Later, in the car park, the cold gets into your good shoes. Dani has gone home. You try to picture the target, the white card you were aiming at that autumn, and you can't, only the long line of the shaft flying low over the field and dropping somewhere in the nettles past the hedge. You kneel by the rear wheel and sweep the grass with your phone torch. Nothing. Then the light catches a scrap of feather caught in the stems, dark blue at the edges, and you pick it up, and you put it in your coat pocket, and you go home.