Fine line black arrow tattoo on the outer side of a bare foot with teal painted toenails, resting on white sheets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a white sheet, with the foot on the right showing a small black arrow tattoo on its outer side. The arrow is drawn in thin, delicate linework with a pointed head and feathered fletching, shaded only in black ink. The photograph is close and well lit, with soft colour from the teal nail polish and pale skin contrasting against the sheet.

Fine line Other Arrow Foot Toenails Nail polish

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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

Mind the step, there's coal dust on it yet, so sit where the lamp can reach you. Now, the arrow. Everybody in Hollin Bank knew about Tom Pardoe's arrow, because it was the only thing he ever drew straight.

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Tom was a fletcher's lad at the colliery stores, which meant his days went on binding goose feathers to ash shafts for the boys who still shot at rabbits on the slag heap. He had hands as steady as a surgeon's and a temper like wet paper. When the pit flooded in the winter of the long dark, the rescue men sent up for every bow in the village, and Tom sat three nights filing arrowheads from old tram rail so they would sing when they flew.

What the men needed was a line. A rope ran through the lower gallery, but the air had gone foul at the bend, and nobody could call out past it without coughing up his lungs. So Tom crawled down with a bow and a spool of linen thread, and at the bend he loosed one shaft into the timber above the old pumphouse, where the roof opened into the bell of the shaft. The thread unspooled behind it like a seam being stitched backwards through the dark. They followed it out, hand over hand, all eleven of them.

They say that arrow is still lodged up there, though nobody's been down to look. Tom never shot a true line again, not once, and his mother said that was the price. I say the thread was the thing that mattered, and that when they found him at the bend, his fist was still closed around the spool, and not one turn of it had been wasted.