Black and grey tattoo of bundled arrows with feathered fletching, a looped cord and an arrowhead on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bundled arrows and arrowhead on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bundle of arrows with feathered fletching runs diagonally down the forearm, tied with a looped cord and ending in a detailed arrowhead at the bottom. The linework is fine and the feathers and shafts are built up with soft grey shading. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a pale background, with the skin photographed in even, natural light.

Forearm Arrow Feather Arrowhead Cord Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was on a Saturday, in the back room of the Crown in Lydd, and nobody had yet agreed who would carry the arrows. Mr Keel had left them to the school in his will: six shafts bound with a leather cord and a string of wooden beads. The head teacher had handed the bundle to Ida Marsh at the gate with the words "you'll know what to do with these." She did not. She had not touched a bow since Year Nine.

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Pru arrived first, in a coat too thin for March, and sat with one hand flat on the bundle as if it might roll off the table. Sam came late, carrying a folded map of the old butts behind the rugby pavilion. "He always said the fletching told you which way the wind was going," he said. They worked the knot loose together, the cord stiff with age, and found tucked beneath the beads a strip of paper in Keel's cramped hand: Bind them the way you'd want them carried. Then cut the cord.

Nobody wanted to cut it. They talked about the summer he made them shoot at a hay bale until the grass went brown, and about the girl who put an arrow through the pavilion roof. Pru laughed until she coughed. Ida turned the barbed head over in her palm, filed by hand to a fine point, and understood that the instruction had never been about the wood.

She left the cord whole and retied the bundle with a single loose knot, then set it in the middle of the table. "We'll take them out to the field in the morning," she said. Outside, the rain stopped, and for once none of them reached for a drink to fill the silence.