Fine line black tattoo of five arrows, one with a feathered fletching, on the upper arm below a checked shirt sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five arrows on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Five slender arrows fan out across the skin, with a feathered fletching at the top of the group and arrowheads pointing downward. The linework is thin and even, with small details such as the feather texture and tiny barbs. The ink is black on light skin, and the small motif sits centred on the arm against a plain background.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frost had kept the lane hard since Tuesday, and Nell Tarrant walked it with a feather box under one arm and a lamp in the other hand, because the dark came down by four now and the geese would not wait for daylight. Her father had fletched arrows at the kitchen table for forty years. His knuckles had swollen to knots before he died, so the work passed to her, along with the cough in the barn and the debt on the top field.

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She sorted the feathers the way he had taught her: grey goose for the quick shafts, barred turkey for the heavy ones, and the best pair from the gander's left wing saved for the slender arrows that went to the archery club in Ludlow. Five had been ordered. Mr Hollis wanted them by the Epiphany shoot, with the vanes cut so they sat tight against the shaft and the tiny barbs left on so the lamplight caught them.

She worked until the stove ticked. Each nock was filed by hand. Each head was bound with waxed thread, glued, and left to set overnight. When the last shaft was done she laid all five across the scrubbed table, and they fanned out like a hand of cards, points turned down toward the wood.

On the morning of the shoot the frost had lifted from the lane, and a note lay under the door in Hollis's cramped hand. He had taken only four. The fifth, he wrote, was hers to keep, since her father had always said a good arrow should stay where it was made. She read it twice, then went out in her boots to feed the geese.