Small black fine line arrow tattoo with shaded fletching on the forearm of a person wearing a grey t-shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line arrow on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow runs horizontally across the forearm, with a thin black shaft, a dot near the tail and a shaded arrowhead and fletching. The linework is crisp and delicate, with grey shading creating depth in the feathers. The image is a close crop on the arm against a plain grey background, with the head out of frame and a grey marled t-shirt at the top.

Fine line Forearm Arrow

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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

Pull your hoods up and shuffle in under the fish-stall awning, because this rain has no intention of stopping before dinner. Right. You've asked for the arrow story, and I'll give it you the way old Mrs Anwen gave it me, sitting on an upturned crate exactly where you're standing now.

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There was a fletcher's daughter called Nell Harker who worked in a shed behind the cattle market, where the rain drummed on the tin roof louder than any customer. Every shaft she made, she dotted near the tail with a bead of soot and a drop of linseed, so she'd know her own work when it came back. Her father used to say an arrow without a mark is only a stick that's given up. She'd laugh and keep dotting.

One grey Tuesday she tested a new shaft from the top of the old bridge, aimed at the hills where the weather gets made. It sailed clean over the dyers' yard, over the chapel roof, and dropped into the lap of a boy shelling peas on the steps of the corn exchange. He turned it over, saw the dot, and put it in his coat, meaning to return it. He never found her. He kept it in a drawer for forty years, and the shaft went the colour of strong tea while the fletching softened like wet bread.

Then one morning a woman with a shawl over her head stopped at his stall and asked whether anyone in town still made arrows. He pulled the drawer open. She turned the shaft over, found the dot, and laughed until the rain ran off her chin. 'Late,' she said, 'but it got here.' She pressed a fresh one into his hand, dotted and dry, and walked off into the weather without once looking back.