Fine line black tattoo of an arrow with a feather fletching and a geometric arrowhead on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and arrow on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs diagonally across the skin, with a feather at the top drawn in delicate single lines and small wisps and dots around the fletching. The diamond-shaped arrowhead and the bead-like rings along the shaft are outlined in fine, even black linework with light shading. The tattoo is in black ink only, shown against plain, evenly lit skin with a dark background to the right.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Arrow Feather Arrowhead Diamond Bead Dot

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

The third arrow flew wide, and Tamsin the fletcher's youngest watched it sink into the wrong oak with a sound like a dropped spoon. The archers of Carrow laughed. Her father did not. He took the shaft from the bark, turned it in his fingers, and said nothing about the feather, which had lifted against the wind as if it wanted to be somewhere else.

Keep reading

Carrow had a king who loved a contest more than he loved his treasury. Each spring he hung a ring of silver beads from the castle gate, and whoever split the mark through the centre took one bead for every hand's breadth the arrow had travelled. Nobody had ever taken more than four. The beads were strung along the shaft of every winning arrow so the lords could count them, and so the arrows told the story of who had been lucky and who had been clever.

Tamsin knew the wind was the trouble, not her hand. She sat in the reeds by the millrace for three evenings, letting the feathers she had plucked from the heron drift past her face and watching which way each one bent. On the third evening she knapped a point from grey flint into a diamond with four sharp faces and bound it to the shaft with waxed thread. The first bead she slid on was black jet from the mill wheel's broken axle. The second she made from a drop of tin.

At the gate she loosed without looking up. The feather caught the breeze, rose a finger's width, and the arrow split the mark clean through. The king counted the beads on her shaft, then counted them again, and asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted the wind to stop being unfair, and he laughed until he had to sit down. She took three beads and left the rest on the gatepost for someone else to carry home.