Two forearms held together on a sunny beach, each with a small black fine line tattoo, an arrow on the left and a bow on the right, both on the inner forearm.

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Matching arrow and bow tattoos on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold hands on a beach with the sea and sky behind them. Each forearm carries a small, thin black outline tattoo: an arrow with a feathered fletching on the left arm and a bow with a drawn string on the right. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the plain background keeps the focus on the two designs.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Lost property at Hebden Cross held everything people forgot on trains: umbrellas, a tin of pastilles, a violin case with no violin inside. Nell Ashdown signed for the bow on a wet Tuesday in October, a long yew stave wrapped in green baize, with a pencilled label that said only 'Collect, Platform 2, Saturday'. Nobody collected it. By the third Saturday she had stopped pretending she was not waiting too.

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The arrow came a week later, pushed through the grille in a brown envelope by a boy in a school blazer who ran before she could ask where he had got it. The shaft was ash, the fletching grey goose feather, and someone had bound the nock with thread the colour of shallow sea. Near the point, a name was scratched into the wood: T. Hale, and beneath it a date in 1961, the year her mother had been born.

The number on the label belonged to a repair shop in Leeds that had shut years ago, so on Saturday Nell took the 9.14 with both pieces wrapped inside her coat. At the end of Platform 2 a man stood drinking tea from a flask, the same man she had only ever glimpsed behind the buffet glass. He looked at the bow for a long time, then at the arrow, and told her she was holding the grip wrong.

He did not say anything else until the train pulled in. Then he took the arrow, set it to the string without looking, and handed the whole thing back to her. 'It was never meant to stay in one place,' he said, and climbed aboard before she could ask him what he meant.