Eight line drawn arrow designs in a fine line geometric style, with a few teal accents, sketched on white paper beside two black pigment liner pens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eight arrow designs on paper

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

Eight arrow designs are drawn in black ink on white paper, each with a different fletching, shaft and arrowhead. The linework is fine and precise, with small triangles, diamonds, dots and dotted shading in the tips. Most of the arrows are black, but two have teal fills on the fletching or a small detail, and two black pens lie across the bottom edge of the sheet.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Arrow Feather Chevron Triangle Diamond Dot Sketch

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, like most things under this canvas now. Pull that crate over and sit where the lamp can find you. You've come about the archery act, the one with the eight arrows. Everybody asks about the arrows and nobody asks about the woman who kept them straight.

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Her name was Ida Scoble, and she joined the Varley Brothers show the winter her mother's feather fan went to the pawnbroker. She carried a quiver of eight shafts, each fletched differently. Chevrons for the first two, cut from a pigeon her uncle kept on the roof. Feathers ribbed like fish bones for the third. The ones with the little diamonds she filed herself at a bench behind the lion cage. She dipped the tip of the fifth in a bottle of teal ink from a shop in Lowestoft, because she said a fletching ought to be the one thing in the show that looked like it had somewhere better to be.

The owners sold the big top to a scrap man in March. The horses went first, then the clowns, and by the last night there was only Ida, the ringmaster asleep in his boots, and one boy from the village on the front bench with a torn programme on his knee. She stood at the board, laid the eight arrows across her left forearm, and shot them one after another so quickly the boy said afterwards it sounded like a zip being drawn. None of them hit the board. They landed in the sawdust in a straight line from her feet to the flap of the tent, a path a child could follow out into the dark, and she told him to walk it.

The boy did walk it. I know because he was my grandfather, and he kept the fifth arrow on his mantelpiece until the day he died. Eight arrows, and not one of them was ever aimed at a person. That was the whole trick, if you want to know. Now mind the step on your way out.