Black dotwork and fine line tattoo of five arrows on a forearm, with a hamsa hand holding an eye at the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five arrows with hamsa hand on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five stylised arrows run vertically down the skin, each with a feathered or fletched end and a decorative arrowhead. The central arrow carries a hamsa hand with an eye in its palm, and the other arrows are decorated with stippled dotwork shading. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black ink on pale skin, with the design arranged in a balanced, evenly spaced column.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Arrow Eye Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fletcher's widow had five arrows left on her bench when the frost came, and she would not sell them to the lord's men. She carried them out to the kitchen garden where the beans had died back, and she set them in a row across the frozen bed, each one tipped with a different head.

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Her son had gone up the valley with the hunt and not come down. The neighbours said the wood had a watcher, and that it looked at a man the way a crow looks at a seed. So she pressed her open hand into the wet clay, drew round it with the end of a bean cane, and scratched an eye into the middle of the palm where the lines crossed.

Each shaft she dressed with goose feathers from the flock that had bitten her grandson. Along the shafts she pricked tiny dots with a hot needle, one for every winter she had buried someone. Then she pushed the arrows point-down into the palm's clay, so the fletched ends stood up like reeds, and she sat on the step to wait.

Her son came down at midwinter with an empty quiver and a limp. He stopped at the gate and looked at the row of shafts standing in the frost, and he laughed until he coughed. Nobody in the village ever pulled those arrows up. They stood there all through the hungry months, and the crows, which came down on every fence in the valley, never once landed among them.