Black and grey realism tattoo of a feather above an arrowhead on the inner forearm, with red wrapping at the shaft.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather and arrowhead on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a feather with a shaded black and grey quill rising to a bladed arrowhead, which has a red binding wrapped around its shaft. The feather and arrowhead are shaded with smooth gradients and fine detail, and the red accents stand out against the grey. The photo is shown as two close-up views of the same forearm, one wider and one zoomed in on the arrowhead.

Realism Forearm Feather Arrowhead Arrow Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your aunt has already bound the first shaft in red thread by the time you reach the bench, and she does not look up when you ask whether it is meant for the hunter from the far side of Hollin Wood. Outside, the beech edge is dripping. The village smells of wet bracken and woodsmoke, and somewhere behind the cottages a dog is barking at nothing.

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The point is flint, knapped that morning from a grey nodule your aunt dug out of the chalk bank below the old quarry. It is not a pretty point. It has a barb on each side like the teeth of a saw, and when you press your thumb against the edge it draws a bead of blood before you can stop it. She tells you that a barbed point does not come out of a wound the way it went in. She says this while winding the red thread tight, three turns, then a knot she ties with her teeth.

The feather is a wood pigeon's flight quill, grey-black near the tip and paler at the base where the vane is torn. You strip the fletching carefully, lay it along the shaft, and bind it with sinew. The hunter comes at dusk, as promised, and takes the arrow without speaking. He turns it over once, like a man weighing a coin, then nods at the red wrapping.

'Why red?' he asks. Your aunt shrugs. 'So you can find it in the leaves,' she says, and you both know it is a lie, because the thread is from your mother's wedding box and the flint is from the bank where the quarry men still bury their dead. He walks off into the trees with the arrow held low. You watch until the bracken closes behind him, then you go back inside and start on the next one.