Fine line black tattoo of four arrows, two with feathered fletching, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four arrows on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four arrows run diagonally down the inner wrist, each with a thin shaft and a small arrowhead, and two of them have feathered fletching drawn in fine detail. The linework is thin and even, and the design is shaded in black ink only, with no colour. The arrows fan out across the skin against a plain pale background, with a dark metal chain bracelet sitting above the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Feather 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

Rain had been coming off the canvas awning all morning, so the feathers on my father's stall stayed damp and wouldn't lie flat. I sorted goose and turkey quills into tins while he shouted prices at people who didn't stop. "Four pounds the set," he told a woman with a pram, and she laughed and kept walking.

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The arrows were his last commission. Mr Achterberg, who ran the archery club behind the swimming baths, had ordered four shafts of ash and wanted each one fletched differently, so he could tell them apart in long grass. Dad cut the feathers himself, split and trimmed fine as eyelashes, and bound the nock ends in thread the colour of wet slate. He gave me the two lace-fletched ones to hold while he worked. My fingers weren't steady enough for it. His were.

On the last Saturday in October the arrows were still lying on the trestle when a boy in a borrowed anorak stopped and asked what they were for. I said I didn't know. He looked at the thin shafts and the small barbed heads and asked if they flew straight. Dad, who hadn't spoken since breakfast, said they would fly as straight as whoever loosed them.

The boy bought all four with a ten-pound note he'd folded into a square. When he'd gone, water ran off the awning in a line, and I saw that one feather had lifted from its shaft. I pressed it back down with my thumb and held it there until the glue took.