Fine line black arrow tattoo running along the side of a finger on the hand, with the arrowhead pointing left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow with a pointed head at one end and feathered fletching at the other is inked along the side of a finger. The linework is thin and solid black, with no shading. The image is a close photograph of a hand held in a loose curl against a dark fabric background, with dark painted nails visible.

Fine line Hand Arrow

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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

You climb the stairwell of Harrow Point with a carrier bag of onions knocking against your shin at every landing, and the smell of someone's curry follows you up from the fourth floor. The lift has been dead since Tuesday. Kofi has been waiting at the bottom since teatime, pretending not to watch the car park, because you promised him proper arrows from the lost property drawer in the caretaker's cupboard, the ones with real feathers and not the bent garden canes you made last summer.

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On the eighth floor you stop at the landing window to get your breath back. Below, the car park lamps have come on early and turned the puddles orange. Someone has left a pigeon feather stuck to the sill, grey-barred and split down the middle. You pull it free and sit on the radiator to work on it, stripping one side of the vane so the rest lies flat, the way Mr Okafor showed you on the balcony with his own old bow. A shaft needs its fletching set at the same slant or it wanders in the air, and you have only the one feather, so you use the flyer from under the door about the bin collection, folded tight and wrapped round the cane until it holds.

You notch the back end with your door key and bind the lot with a strip of cotton torn from a tea towel. The point is a nail you pried from the bench, filed against the concrete step until it went sharp enough to hurt your thumb. It is not a good arrow. It is a leaning, lopsided thing that will not go far.

At the balcony rail you draw it back and look down past the bins to where Kofi stands under the lamp, a small upturned face. You let go. The arrow dips, turns its point towards the wet grass and drops, the feather flicking once as it goes. He runs to pull it out of the ground by the tail end, then holds it up to the light and reads the flyer folded inside, which says BIN DAY MONDAY in your handwriting, and beneath that, in smaller letters, the words he asked you to write.