Black and grey fine line tattoo of a feathered arrow with a patterned shaft and a curved bow line with beads, sitting on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered arrow on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A feathered arrow with a patterned shaft runs vertically across the upper arm, with a curved bow line and small beads hanging beside it. The linework is fine and sharp, with stippled shading on the feathers and bold dark marks along the shaft. The tattoo is in black and grey on pale skin, set against a blurred background of wall stickers and a bag.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Feather Bow Bead Tribal pattern

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

Ada Crane made arrows in the back room of the saddler's in Hollin Cross, and she made them the old way. She cut the shafts from ash that had stood through a winter, banded them with thread in a pattern her mother had shown her, and fixed the flight feathers with hide glue that smelled of the river. Men came for them when they went up the fell after deer. Nobody asked her what the pattern meant, because it was only a pattern.

Keep reading

One November a boy named Tom Ferrier came in with a bow he had carved himself and no string for it. He wanted an arrow that would go where he looked. Ada told him she did not sell that kind. She took a length of grey wool from her basket, strung three beads of jet along it, and bent the bow with it so the curve would hold. "Shoot at the thing you can't see yet," she said, "and bring me back whatever it turns out to be."

He went out at dusk and came back before the church clock struck ten, white-faced, with nothing in his hands. He had loosed the arrow at the moor edge and it had not come down. Ada laughed at him until he cried. Then she reached up to the shelf where she kept the ones nobody collected and took down a single arrow, its feathers gone grey with dust, and laid it across his palms.

It was the same arrow she had made for her father the winter he went to sea, and he had never come home to collect it. Tom carried it up the fell every morning after that and never once lost it. Ada kept the bow and the beads and the wool, and when people asked why the shaft was banded the way it was, she said it was only a pattern.