Fine line tattoo of a feather on an arrow shaft with a thin curved trail and small triangle fletching, shaded in teal and grey on the calf.

Feather and arrow on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A feather with a curved shaft and a small triangular tip forms the subject, drawn as a continuous thin black outline that loops back along the limb. The feather is filled with soft teal and grey shading, while the arrow shaft and trail are single fine black lines. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with the tattoo centred against plain skin and a blurred background.

Fine line Calf Feather Arrow Triangle Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mail boat was three hours late the morning the fog came down on Skerra, so my father sent me up the cliff with the bow he kept for seals. A line shot through the air, he said, would reach the Margaret Lowe faster than any shout could. I was nine and thought he was teasing me.

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The arrow went out over the grey water with a tarred cord running behind it, and I watched the fletching vanish into the white. For an hour I stood at the rail and hauled, expecting the weight of a rope at the far end. What came back was only the cord, slack and wet, and knotted to its tip a single gull's feather, the shaft gone.

My father said the sea had taken the arrow and kept the joke. He pinned the feather inside his tobacco tin and said nothing more about it. Next morning the yawl Morag came round the point, its skipper swearing he had steered all night on a pale flicker above the water that bobbed, then steadied, then pointed him home.

I still have the bow. When fog sits on the island now, I walk to the same cliff and loose one arrow over the water, then wait with the cord in my fist. Somebody out there always answers, and the feather stays in my father's tin, where I can feel its edge every time I open it.