Small colour tattoo of an arrow with a red, orange and teal feather on a person's lower leg, photographed outdoors in a grassy clearing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feather arrow tattoo on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A slim arrow with a feathered fletching sits on the lower leg, with the red, orange and teal feather drawn in colour and the shaft and arrowhead in dark outline. The linework is clean and the shading is light, with the colour concentrated in the feather. The leg is shown from behind against a blurred woodland background, with the tattoo placed centrally and the rolled trouser hem at the top of the frame.

Calf Arrow Feather

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

Sit closer, the fire is low and my voice is older than my knees. You want to hear about Ysolde the fletcher, who lived where the river Kanth bends under the cedars. She made arrows the way other women made bread, every morning without thinking, and she never once let a feather go to waste.

Keep reading

Her feathers came from the hill birds. The red she took from a kite that nested above the salt pans, the orange from the finches that came to the burned ground after the lightning fire, and the teal from a jay who stole her bone needles and would not give them back until she sang to him. Three colours, three arrows a season. Her nephew Tavo asked why she painted nothing on the shafts. She told him the feather was the paint, and that a man who needed to be seen from far off was a man who would miss.

The turn came the year the river rose. Tavo took the bow to the north ridge, and Ysolde followed with a single arrow whose fletching she had cut from all three colours at once, pinned tight so they overlapped like a sunset. He laughed at it. She told him to shoot it into the dead pine at the edge of the clearing and see where it landed.

He did. The arrow stood upright in the grey wood, feathers flaming, and the rain that had threatened for a week finally came down the valley to find it.