Illustrated flash design of three decorated arrows, one with leaves, one with yellow feathers and one in black and white with leaves, suitable as a tattoo design.

Three decorated arrows with leaves and feathers

Botanical · Colour · Flash

Three arrows are drawn side by side, each with a different decorative shaft: a brown shaft with green foliage and bands of coloured wrapping, a striped multicoloured shaft with yellow feathers, and a black shaft with white pattern marks and green leaves. Loose grey swirls, dashed lines and small sprigs surround the arrows. The drawing uses flat colour with textured brush-like edges on a plain white background.

Botanical Arrow Leaves Foliage Feather Swirl Dashed line Sprig Pattern Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our father never let us finish a shaft before the wind turned. Hazel rods stood stacked against the barn wall, and the three of us, Wren, Doll and I, worked the bench from first light until the swallows came in low over the hay. The shoot at Holcombe was three weeks off, and the Squire's prize was a silver horn for whichever fletcher's arrow flew furthest across the mere without wobbling.

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Wren wanted hers bare, just goose feathers glued tight and bound in sinew. Doll wrapped hers in every scrap of wool we owned, red and teal and the mustard yarn Mother had dyed with onion skins, and she cut notches down the shaft until it looked like a hedge somebody had dropped. I could not decide, so I bound mine with ivy pulled from the churchyard wall and let the cut stems soak in the wet cloth overnight.

On the morning of the shoot the ivy had split the wrapping and sent green threads past the nock. Father swore at me, then went quiet and turned the shaft slowly in his fingers. "A thing that wants to live, let it," he said, and he cut the fletching to match the leaves. Wren's arrow sliced the wind clean. Doll's struck the straw butt dead centre. Mine dropped short into the reeds, leaves shivering, and nobody could find the spot where it had landed.

The Squire gave the horn to the fletcher from Tarrow that year. He said the three arrows were the only honest things shot at Holcombe all day, and he asked which of us had grown the ivy. When we walked home along the causeway, Father hung all three arrows from the barn beam. By spring the ivy had found the timber, and when the swallows came back they built their nests in the leaves above mine.