Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo of crossed arrows with leaves on the upper arm, close to the underarm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows with leaves on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black ink tattoo of two crossed arrows decorated with leaves sits on the upper arm. The linework is thin and delicate, with solid black fills on the leaves and arrowheads. The black and white photograph is taken close up and shows a second small leaf tattoo higher on the arm, with the rest of the body and a patterned top out of focus.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Arrow Crossed arrows Leaf

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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

Sit nearer, the fire's low and I'm too old to fetch more wood. You want the tale of the two arrows, the one the orchard women still tell at the pressing. Hear it right.

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Ansel and Morwenna Coyle were the gardener's children at Thornwick House, and they were never allowed past the south wall where the old medlar stood. Their father kept the beds, and the beds kept him. One July the Squire's nephew came along the lane after pheasant and loosed two arrows over the wall for a dare, the way young men do when nobody is watching. One fell on the potting shed roof. The other sailed down into the bean rows, its shaft still humming.

Morwenna pulled it from the soil and found the fletching green. Not feathered, green, as if the bird had been grown in a bed of sage. Where the head had gone in, a sprig of mint came up that same afternoon, and by Michaelmas the whole row had bolted into leaves that curled round the broken shaft like ivy round a gate. Ansel said the shed arrow should be treated the same, so they walked the length of the wall at dusk and pressed its head into the earth beneath the medlar.

The thing about a garden, my dears, is that it keeps what you give it. The nephew came back the next spring with a wife and a bad cough, and asked the gardener for one cutting of anything to bring her home. Morwenna handed him a sprig of the arrow-bean, leaves and all, and told him to plant it where he'd been standing when he let fly. He never shot at anything again.

So when you see a pair of arrows crossed with leaves, you know whose wall it was. Mind the bean rows on your way out. They're still growing.