Black dotwork tattoo of a feathered arrow with leaves and a dotted trail, running down the forearm of a person in a white top and black leather skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather arrow on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A feathered arrow runs the length of the forearm, with a detailed feather at the top, leaves branching from the shaft and a triangular arrowhead at the bottom. A dotted trail curls from the feather towards the top of the frame. The feather and arrowhead are built from stippled dots and fine shading, while the shaft and leaves use solid black lines. The tattoo is entirely black ink against pale skin, with a white top and black leather skirt in the background.

Dotwork Forearm Arrow Feather Leaves Arrowhead Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had been fletching for thirty years when the goose feathers stopped arriving from the Fens, so she started taking jays from the hedgerows instead, the blue and the black, and sorting them by how the light passed through them. Her father had taught her that a feather must be turned against the grain before it will lie flat on the shaft, and that a good fletcher listens for the small tick a binding makes when it is tight enough to hold.

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The archer who came to the workshop that autumn had no patience for waiting. He wanted a shaft of ash for his long bow, three vanes set at the angle that would make it spin true. Marta pricked a line of dots across the bench to show him where the flight would go, starting with a curl like the first loop of a river. He laughed and said a man could not see a path that was not yet walked.

She fixed the vanes that night by lamplight, stippling the barbs with a bone point so they stood apart like the fingers of a hand. The leaves came last, carved into the wood below the fletching, and she did not know why she cut them until morning, when she saw they had sprouted from the shaft the way buds break from a dead branch in March. The head she left plain, a dark triangle of iron.

He came for it at dusk. She handed it over and told him not to loose it at anything that could not forgive him. He drew and released toward the marsh, and the arrow lifted with a sound like paper turning. Somewhere beyond the reeds it dropped into the water where a heron had been standing, and the heron, Marta thought, had never once looked back.