Small fine line arrow tattoo in dark ink on the inner forearm, pointing left with a feathered fletching at the back.

Fine line arrow on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single thin arrow with a pointed head on the left and three or four short feather strokes at the right end. The linework is even and single-weight, in dark blue-black ink. The arrow sits horizontally across the pale inner forearm, with the upper arm and elbow crease visible at the top and bottom edges of the frame against a teal background.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Fletching

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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

Your grandfather presses the arrow into your hand at the pit head before the cage drops, not because he expects you to shoot anything down the shaft but because he wants something in your fist that isn't coal. The shaft is ash, straight-grained, and the fletching is three goose feathers bound with waxed thread that still smells faintly of the hall kitchen. Keep your thumb off the nock, he says. The nock is where it wants to go.

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On Sundays you walk up to the bowmen's field behind the Welfare, where the rain comes in sideways off the slag heaps and the wooden targets have gone soft at the edges. You shoot at the silhouette of the winding wheel because it is the only thing in the valley that never moves. The wind takes your first three shots left, every time. Your uncle, who lost two fingers to a roof fall in 1961 and still shoots better than anyone, tells you a flight is decided by the feathers, not the point. The point only does the arguing. You learn to trust the back end of the thing, the small stubborn vanes that turn it into the wind.

The shift whistle goes at four and the men come up the lane with their lamps still lit, faces grey, laughing at something nobody else heard. You stop counting the years you have left in the village. At eighteen you take the train south with the arrow wrapped in a tea towel and a tin of spare feathers, and for a long time you don't shoot at all.

In a rented flat in a city where no one knows what a winding wheel is, you sit at a kitchen table with the sash window open and thread a new feather onto the shaft. Your hands are slower than they used to be. When you finish, you turn the arrow until the nock faces the window, toward the hills you cannot see from here, and you hold it there the way you were taught, thumb clear, waiting for the wind to decide.