Black and grey photograph of a small fine line arrow tattoo with a heart-shaped arrowhead on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small arrow tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small arrow runs horizontally across the inner wrist, with a solid heart-shaped arrowhead on the left and a feathered fletching on the right. The linework is thin and even, with the tattoo shaded in solid black ink against pale skin. The photograph is black and white and centres the tattoo against a blurred background of a wooden surface and a dark object.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Heart

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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 shavings, they get in your boots. Sit by the window where the light falls, and I'll tell you about the arrow Hob Crake made for Nell Ashworth, because you've come a long way to look at a thing no longer than my thumb.

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Hob was a fletcher in Wakefield in the hard winter when the Calder froze solid. He cut goose feathers into thirds, bound them with waxed thread, and glued them to ash shafts with pitch he kept warm in a tin by the stove. Every shaft he sold to the lord's archers went out plain. But Nell came in one February with a torn glove and four pennies, and she asked for one that would find its mark without being fired at anything at all.

Hob told her a heart is a poor point, it turns in the wind. She said she had no use for piercing, only for being found. So he filed a heart from a scrap of horn no bigger than a barley grain and set it on a shaft of straight-grained ash. He fletched it with three feathers so fine they barely stirred when he breathed on them, and that was the whole of the work.

Nell took it home and never shot it. Years later, Hob's own daughter found a second arrow of the same make in the bench drawer, wrapped in vellum, with Nell's name scratched beneath the fletching. She walked it up Westgate herself and laid it on Nell's step, and I am told the feathers were still crisp when the paper came off.