Close-up of a small black fine line arrow tattoo on the inner forearm of a person wearing a denim shirt.

Single arrow on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single arrow runs diagonally across the inner forearm, with a pointed head at the upper left and feathered fletching at the lower right. The thin, even black linework is crisp and simple, with no shading. The ink sits against warm skin, and the shot is framed tightly on the arm, with a grey top and light denim shirt in the background.

Fine line Forearm Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vicar had asked that the bow stay out of the photographs, so Dad hid it behind the marquee's center pole with the cake knife and two bottles of cider. I was nine, and I had been trusted with the quiver because I was the only child who wouldn't drop it in the mud.

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My cousin Ellen was marrying a lad from Hexham who could not hit a hay bale at three paces. Grandad had made the arrows that spring, sanding the shafts in his shed while rain came sideways off the fells. Each one had goose feathers cut into a neat swept fletching and bound with waxed thread. He said a true arrow flies the way a good marriage does: straight enough to get where it's going, loose enough to bend in a crosswind.

At four o'clock the groom wanted a go. He drew badly, his elbow dropping, and the arrow sailed over the hedge into Mrs Pearce's runner beans. Everyone went quiet. Then Grandad walked out, took the last arrow from my hands, and shot it clean over the church tower where nobody could follow. "Go and find that," he said, and the children ran.

We never found it. Ellen kept the first feather that came loose from the groom's arrow, pressed flat in her prayer book, and that is the only piece of the day I still own: a grey feather, and Grandad laughing into his cider at exactly the wrong moment.