Hand-drawn ink sketch of an arrow with a black brushed arrowhead, a thin black shaft and a red splashed fletching on white paper, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Ink arrow with red fletching

Mixed · Flash

A single arrow is drawn vertically in loose black ink, with a dark brushed arrowhead at the top and a fine, tapering shaft. The fletching at the base is painted in red with ragged, splattered edges that contrast with the black lines. The arrow is centred on a plain off-white background with generous empty space around it.

Arrow Fletching Feather

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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

Sit where the lamp can reach you, and mind the step, for the stair has been wet since the spring tide. I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, and she had it from a woman who kept this light before the iron was put up on the headland.

Keep reading

Her name was Morwenna Keel, and she had one bow and one arrow, the last of a quiver her father left her. The ship was the Harriet Vane, out of Bristol, fast on the Scar in a January gale, her masts gone and her crew clinging to the rigging like wet washing. The rocket had failed. The powder would not take in the damp. So Morwenna tied a length of tarred line to the shaft, dipped the fletching in the red dye she kept for the boat-cloth, and stood at the rail with the wind shoving at her back.

Nobody here will tell you she was steady, because she was not. She loosed three times and the arrow went into the sea. The fourth time it cleared the wreck's broken spar, and a man with hands like hooks caught the line and hauled the rope across. The crew came over one by one, hand over hand, while the sea tried to take each of them back.

She kept that arrow, so the story goes, and hung it on the lamp-room wall, and every storm after, the red feathers bled a little colour onto the glass. Whether that's true, I cannot say. I only know the light was never put out while she lived, and that is the end of it.