Five hand-drawn arrows in black ink on a white background, each with a different fletching and arrowhead, drawn as a tattoo design sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five hand-drawn arrows in black line

Black and grey · Flash

Five arrows are stacked in horizontal rows, each with a different arrowhead and feather style, including open triangles, solid points, and chevron fletching. The linework is bold and hand-drawn in dark ink on plain white, with some hatched and dotted detailing on the feathers and a few small dots along one shaft. The composition is evenly spaced and centred, with no shading or colour.

Arrow Feather Arrowhead

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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

The rain had found the gap in the awning by eleven, so I moved the five arrows off the lower shelf and onto the dry board my father used to keep his tools on. Nobody buys arrows on a wet Saturday in Hebden Bridge. Mrs Lyle from the bric-a-brac end came over, shook her umbrella at my boots, and asked why I bothered bringing them out at all.

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I told her they were not really for sale. My father made them in the shed behind the mill, one at a time, and each had a different head because he said the head was where an arrow told you what it wanted. The open triangle at the top, he said, was for a man who wanted to see where he had hit. The solid black point at the bottom wanted to be trusted to go in and stay there. He never fixed a feather until he had asked the shaft first. Mrs Lyle said that sounded like a man who talked to sticks, and I said yes, he did, and they generally listened better than we did.

Tomas, the boy with the bike tyre tied to his bag who comes every Saturday, crouched by the table and put one finger on the arrow with three dots along its shaft. He asked what the dots were for. I said my father never explained the dots, and Mrs Lyle said that was because he did not know either, which made me laugh harder than it deserved.

The rain eased just after one. Tomas counted out twenty pence in coins from a biscuit tin, took the dotted arrow, and asked if I would keep the other four. I stacked them back in the dry corner with the chevrons all pointing the same way, and found three beads of rain sitting on the shaft of the one he had left behind, drifting slowly towards the feathers.