Black and grey tattoo of a bow with arrows radiating outward in a star pattern, placed on the outer thigh above the knee.

Bow and radiating arrows on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bow sits at the centre of the design, with several feathered arrows fanning out from a single point and arrowheads at the ends of the shafts. Fine outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading on the feathers and arrowheads, and the thin radiating lines give the composition a symmetrical, compass-like layout. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, set against a grey brick wall and a red checked skirt.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Bow Arrow Arrowhead Feather Star

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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 bowstring has gone soft with the damp, so you spend the first hour of the Harvest Fair waxing it on an upturned crate behind the coconut shy while the generator coughs somewhere under the big wheel. Mr Oduya has left you the strongbox key and a list in his square capitals: eight arrows per pitch, no more, and nobody touches the yew bow in the case except him. You read the list twice and then look at the case anyway.

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The target on the booth is a painted star of eight points, its rays drawn in thin lines that meet at a nail hammered dead centre. Children throw their pennies at it for a goose or a plastic dolphin. Most of them shoot wide, and the arrowheads, filed from old horseshoe nails by a smith in Ludlow who never asks what they are for, skitter off the boards into the sawdust. By nine o'clock the fair has thinned to the teenagers from the estate and the moths round the lamp.

Pell comes last, the way she always does, with mud on her trainers and a paper cone of chips she shares with no one. She counts her pennies into your palm. She has been coming for three summers and knows the rules better than you do, so when she asks for the yew bow you hesitate, then open the case. She draws it the way Mr Oduya showed her, cheek to the string, elbow high, and the note it makes is low and clean across the empty field.

She does not hit the star. The arrow clears the canvas, clears the tent pole and the tops of the stalls, and drops out of sight beyond the brick wall of the car park. You stand there with the bow in your hands while the bell rings for someone else's win. Next morning, walking the field with a bin bag, you find nothing in the grass. Only, high on the white bracket of the big wheel, a single feathered shaft points straight up at the stars, and you leave it there.