Black and grey flash design of four arrows wrapped in a ribbon reading A MAN MUST MAKE HIS OWN ARROWS, with feathered shafts and radiating lines.

Four arrows with ribbon banner quote

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A design drawing of four arrows with spearheads and feathered fletching, bound by a ribbon banner that spirals down the shafts. The banner carries the words A MAN MUST MAKE HIS OWN ARROWS in bold serif capitals, set against a speckled, woodcut-style texture. Bold outlines, hatched shading and short radiating lines behind the arrows give the composition a vintage printed look on a cream background.

Traditional Lettering Arrow Ribbon Banner Feather Quote Sunburst

Find an artist for this

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 its way under the awning again, and the glue pot had gone cold. Ada Pell wiped her fingers on her apron and looked at the four shafts laid out on the trestle, their spearheads still bright from the grinder. Her brother Tom had sworn the ash was seasoned enough. He had sworn it the spring before too, and the bow he carved from it had snapped on the first pull.

Keep reading

A stranger came under the awning with his collar up, a man who wanted arrows for a shooting match in the next valley and had no interest in why the goose feathers were grey. He picked one up, sighted down it at the far pole, and said the fletching sat too close to the nock. Ada took it from him, turned it once in the lamplight, and told him a man who wanted his arrows true should cut his own feathers and bind them himself. He laughed, paid for four anyway, and left the coins wet on the board.

Tom came back at dusk with a sack of quills and a face like wet slate. He had lost the match money at cards. Ada didn't scold. She fetched the sinew from the drawer, set the lamp beside her, and started on the first arrow while the rain drummed on the canvas. By the time the stall lights dimmed, four shafts stood in a bucket by the door, straight as church candles.

Next morning the stranger came back for his change and found the trestle bare and a scrap of paper pinned under a stone. Tom had written it in pencil, badly spelled, with the word arrows underlined twice. The stranger read it, folded it into his pocket, and walked back up the hill in the rain with nothing in his hands but the wet.