Fine line black tattoo of three crossed arrows with feathered fletching and a looping script monogram in the centre, on the inner upper arm.

Crossed arrows and feathers with monogram

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three arrows crossing at the centre, with feathered fletching at the tops and beaded shafts running down to arrowheads. A looping script monogram sits between the crossed shafts. The linework is thin and precise, with dotwork shading inside the feathers and arrowheads, and the ink is black on pale skin with a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Arrow Feather Monogram Script Bead Arrowhead

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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 ferryman at Saltmarrow kept three arrows in a barrel by his door, and no one in the town could say whose they had been. Every spring the tide brought up a few more from the wrecks off the Gannet Rocks, feathered ends still bright, heads crusted with green weed. Old Ysolde mended them for the fishermen's sons, fitting new sinew and beaded cords to the shafts so the boys could shoot seagulls off the quay and tell the girls they had done it for love.

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One March a stranger came off the mail boat with a monogram cut into a scrap of oilcloth and asked if anyone knew the letters. Ysolde turned the cloth over in her hands for a long time. The looping strokes were the same as the marks scratched on the underside of the barrel lid, the ones nobody had ever read. She said so. The stranger laughed, not unkindly, and said that was the trouble with letters: they only meant something to the hand that made them.

That night the wind swung round to the west and the three arrows in the barrel began to hum, very faintly, the way the rigging does before a gale. Ysolde took them down to the harbour wall, laid them crossed on the cold stone, and waited. By dawn the stranger's boat was gone, and in the morning mud the tide had left behind lay a single fletched arrow pointing straight out past the rocks, as if someone had marked the way home.