Fine line tattoo of three arrows with striped multicoloured shafts and dark grey feathers on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three arrows are drawn diagonally across the skin, with their feathered fletching at the upper left and arrowheads pointing to the lower right. The linework is fine and delicate, and the shading gives the feathers a soft, dark grey and black finish. The shafts are filled with bands of red, orange, pink and blue, so the colour is layered over a pale skin tone with plenty of empty space around the design.

Fine line Forearm Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard behind Hollins Farm had gone heavy with windfalls by the last week of August, and you were the one sent to count the arrows back from the Bramley trunk. Your uncle Rob had strung the old longbow for the cousins, and the target was a hay bale with a paper plate pinned to it. Three of the shafts had gone wide and lodged in the wrinkled bark, their feathers gone the grey of wet ash.

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The shafts were the odd thing. Somebody, years back, had wound each one with strips of coloured thread, red near the nock, then orange, then a pink like rhubarb, then a blue you could only find in a dye lot nobody made any more, so that when the sun caught them they looked less like weapons than something cut from a kite. Rob said his mother had done it so the children would stop losing them in the long grass. You had lost plenty anyway.

You worked the first one free and the bark let go with a sound like a cork pulled from a bottle. The second took more persuasion. By the time you had the third, the light had gone long and gold across the rows, wasps were drunk on the fallen fruit, and the cousins were shouting from the gate that tea was on.

You laid the three of them side by side on the grass, heads pointing down the slope toward the house, and saw they had always been meant to fly in a line. Nobody had told you that. You picked up the longest one and went to find the bow.