Small fine line tattoo of four arrows in black ink on the inner upper arm, with a checked shirt sleeve at the top of the frame.

Four arrows on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo of four arrows running diagonally down the inner upper arm, with feathered fletching at the top of the shafts and arrowheads at the bottom. The linework is thin and delicate, with light dotted detail on the shafts and fletching. The ink is black on pale skin against a neutral background, and the design sits in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Feather Fletching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Fenn had been fletching for her father since she was nine, which meant that by the spring of the Whitsun shoot she could tell a goose feather from a hen's by the sound it made when she drew it through her teeth. Her father had gone to bed with a cough and not got up again, and the four arrows he had promised the Ashby bowmen sat on the bench unfinished, their shafts pale and straight as church candles.

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She worked through the night with the lamp turned low. The first arrow she feathered in grey goose, the barbs cut so fine the light came through them. The second she dotted along the shaft with a hot awl, a line of small marks like the tally her father kept on the wall for every eel he sold. The third she fletched tight and short, because he had always said a short arrow forgives a short temper. The fourth she left plain at the nock, and when she came to the heads she filed each one to a different point, one barbed, one leaf-shaped, one like a fishhook, because the Ashby men never agreed about anything and she meant to give them a choice.

At the shoot the wind came off the marsh and took two of the arrows wide. Mabel stood at the butts with her hands in her apron, watching the grey fletching bend and recover. Then the fourth arrow, the plain one, cut the air clean and buried itself in the gold.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then old Tom Ashby pulled it free, turned the head in the sun, and asked her what she called that one. She told him it was her father's, and he nodded as if that settled a bill.