Black and grey dotwork drawing of three feathers with beads, an arrow and a crescent moon, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork feathers with beaded crescent moon

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stencil-style drawing of three feathers hanging from an arrow shaft, with strings of beads and a small ornate crescent moon with a diamond motif below. The feathers combine fine outline linework with stippled dotwork shading along their vanes and quills. The design is rendered in black ink on a plain white background with no colour.

Dotwork Feather Bead Crescent moon Arrow Diamond Dreamcatcher Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

Every reunion in Hollin Bank ended with somebody asking about the arrow, and every year Ruth Askew gave the same answer: it had come off the moor path the winter the three of them went up after the lambing and only two came down.

Keep reading

The tale goes that the eldest, Agnes, wore a crescent moon on a string of beads, and the string could find anything lost if you held it to the window at dusk. The youngest, little Tom, counted beads under his breath to keep from being frightened, and he counted the path too. The middle girl, Ellen, carried the arrow, and when the mist came up thick she shot it ahead of them into the dark so they would know which way was straight. Wherever it landed, they followed it.

So when the reunion committee hung the arrow up in the hall rafters, the beads began slipping loose and lay in a ring on the floorboards every Friday morning. Ruth gathered them into her cardigan pocket and counted them at the bus stop. There were nine, and a tenth that was a small silver diamond. She threaded them back onto the shaft herself, one after another, and while she tied the last knot the lights dimmed across the whole village. In the morning three feathers lay on the chapel step, each with a bead wound into its quill, and the path up to the moor was clear as far as the stile.