Black and grey shaded arrow tattoo with feathered fletching and a barbed head running down the inner forearm.

Shaded arrow on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs vertically down the inner forearm, with shaded feathers at the top, a long straight shaft and a detailed arrowhead with a wrapped binding at the base. The shading is in black and grey, with soft gradients on the feathers and head. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale forearm against an indoor background of a wooden floor, wall and office chair.

Forearm Arrow Feather Arrowhead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bowyer's daughter at Haddon Reach had already made eleven arrows for men who wanted to hit things, and all eleven came back split. The twelfth she made for Tomas Vell, who wanted to know where the water had gone. She cut the feathers from a grey goose she had kept alive for three summers, shaded them dark at the root, and told him a feather should look like it still remembered the sky.

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He carried it up the cable road to the ridge where the old signal towers leaned against each other like drunk men. The shaft was ash grown along the fence line, straight as a surveyor's chalk. The head was a barb of scavenged alloy, filed until it hummed when he thumbed it, and at its base she had bound the join in waxed cord, three turns and a knot, the same way her mother bound the blades on the ploughs so the iron would not part in hard ground.

He drew to the full length of his arm and loosed at the dry spring below the towers. The arrow did not fly far. It went down through the cracked crust of the riverbed, into the place where the sand was darker, and stood there quivering, its feathers still shaking as if the goose were landing. Nobody in Haddon Reach ever said he had killed anything that day. They said he had found where the sky had gone to ground, and they dug there, and the water came up cold enough to ache the teeth.