Fine line black tattoo of two crossed arrows with feathered fletching on the upper arm of a person wearing a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of two crossed arrows sits on the outer upper arm, with the feathered fletching visible at the top ends. The linework is thin and delicate, with minimal shading and no fill. The photo is shot in soft natural light against a pale background, with the subject's curly hair and black top framing the arm.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Crossed arrows Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad made arrows the way other men mended kettles, quickly and with his back to the room. I was sixteen the spring he let me bind the fletching, goose feathers from Hartley's farm, stripped and glued with fish-skin glue that stank out the whole cottage. Nobody in Coldharbour asked what the arrows were for. They only asked whether the bows would hold.

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The Assembly Rooms on a Saturday smelt of Brylcreem and wet wool. Arthur Penrose came in with the archery club boys, shoulders still stiff from the butts, and stood by the radiogram as if waiting to be called to the line. I crossed the floor before I could lose my nerve. "Those are my father's shafts you're carrying," I said. "You can dance with the woman who fletched them, or you can stand there looking like a target."

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and held out his hand. We danced to a foxtrot that kept skipping, and he told me the club had been losing shafts to the wind all summer because somebody's feathers were coming loose. "Not loose," I said. "Badly bound." He asked if I could show him properly. I said I could show him in the shed on Monday, with the glue pot warm and the light coming through the cracked window.

On Monday he came early. I bound two feathers crosswise on a practice shaft to show him the knot, and he took a pencil from behind his ear and drew the same pair on the back of a dance programme, two lines crossing like a pair of shears. He folded it in half and tucked it into his breast pocket, and it was still there when he walked me home past the chapel, the dance hall lights going out behind us one by one.