Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three arrows on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three arrows hang vertically down the skin, each with a different head and tail. The left arrow has a feathered shaft and a triangular tip, the centre one is topped with a peacock feather showing an eye, and the right arrow has chevron fletching and small dots along its shaft. The linework is thin and mostly solid black with some fine stippled detail, and the composition is simple and centred on the limb.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Arrow Feather Peacock feather Chevron Triangle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock feather had come from the vicar's widow, who swore it was the last of a moulted pair, and Nell had carried it in her apron pocket for a week without deciding anything. Late August hung heavy over the orchard. Wasps worked the windfalls under the Bramleys, and the grass between the trees had gone the colour of old straw. She sat on an upturned crate with the quiver across her knees and sorted the shafts by weight.

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There were three arrows, one for each of them. Her brother had cut the ash the winter their father died, and he had never been able to leave a plain thing plain. The left arrow wore chevron fletching in neat grey stacks. The right one had a triangle of filed brass for a head and small dots pricked along its shaft, one for every hive he had robbed as a boy and never admitted to. The middle arrow carried the peacock feather, its single round eye looking back up the line of trees.

Tom was leaving for the Leeds mills on Monday, and the village shoot was on Saturday, the last chance to put all three through the straw target nailed to the cider barn. Nell loosed the feather first. It flew wide and wobbled, and the widow's voice rose from the lane to say that was no way to treat a gift. Nell laughed until she had to sit down in the grass.

Tom came round the corner with two cups of cider and found her with the feather in her fist. He did not ask what she had decided. He took the dotted arrow from the quiver, fitted it to the string, and drew it back to his ear. When it struck the straw, it stuck fast beside the eye of the peacock, and neither of them went to pull it out.