Black ink tattoo of four arrows running diagonally down the inner arm, with feathered fletching and dotwork-filled arrowheads.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four arrows on the inner arm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Four arrows run diagonally down the skin, each with feathered fletching at the tail and a pointed head. Fine single lines form the shafts, while the fletching and some arrowheads are filled with dense dots and solid black areas. The ink is entirely black on a light skin tone, with the arrows spaced evenly across a narrow section of the arm.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Arrow Arrowhead Feather Fletching Line

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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

Don't stand there gawping, sit where the lamp can reach you, and I'll tell you about the four arrows Tom Pelham cut for the Midsummer shoot in 1953. Ash shafts, every one, planed on his mother's kitchen table because the bench in the wheelwright's was too cold for the glue. He gave each arrow its own fletching. The first he dressed with goose feathers from the Hallam farm, the second with a single pheasant plume he'd won off the squire at cards, and the third he dotted all over with ink until it looked like a wren's egg. The fourth he left plain, which he said was his idea of a joke.

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The shoot was meant for the four lads who'd come home from Korea that spring, though nobody said it aloud at the Red Lion. They stood at the butts with their backs to the sun and loosed one after another while the church clock struck noon. The first arrow went wide into the hedge. The second stuck in the boards and quivered there like a dropped pin. The third and fourth flew true and fell short, one into the brook and one onto the cricket pitch, where the vicar's boy swore he'd find it again once the grass was cut.

Here's the thing about arrows, my love. They never ask where they're going to land. Tom spent the rest of his life carving those same four points into doorframes around the parish, and not one of them ever hit the painted ring he'd nailed to the barn. But you go and look at the frame in the Hallams' back kitchen and tell me what you see.