Two matching fine line arrow tattoos in black ink on forearms, one arm resting across the other on a wooden bench.

Matching arrow tattoos on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show matching arrow tattoos, each with a feathered fletching, a thin shaft and a diamond-shaped head. The linework is fine and even, with soft grey shading in the feathers and the arrowheads left as outlines. The photograph is taken outdoors, with the arms crossed over a wooden bench and grass in the background.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Feather Arrowhead Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Calloway sorted goose quills on the kitchen table of the cottage above Sgeir Bay, turning each one until its curve sat right against the window light. Her brother Tam wanted the arrows finished before the boat came over from Inish Morra on Thursday. He wanted the heads filed to the same diamond their father had cut the winter before the sea took him, and he would not say why, only that the mainland cousins would know the pattern when they saw it.

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She worked through the night with the window open, binding feathers with waxed thread while the gulls argued on the slate roof. The shafts were ash, straight-grained and pared thin enough to bend and spring back. By dawn she had two arrows that looked the same from either end. She marked one with a loop of copper wire below the fletching, the way their father used to mark what was meant to leave the island and what was meant to stay.

On Thursday the boat came in low in the water, with cousin Ellen standing in the prow, hair wild, a parcel of smoked mackerel under one arm. She took the copper-wired arrow without a word and held it up against the grey sky, sighting along it toward the headland. Then she laughed, short and sharp, and said Tam had always been a terrible liar about feathers.

Ruth watched the boat bend toward the Sound until the copper wire caught the sun and went out. Tam's plain arrow was already standing in the stand by the door, its diamond head pointed at the ceiling, waiting for a bow that no one on the island had strung since spring.