Colour tattoo of two feathered arrows with dots on a forearm, in a neo-traditional style with pink, teal and red tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two arrows with feathers on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two pairs of arrows with feathered fletching run along the inner forearm, with a larger pair on the upper side and a smaller pair lower down. The feathers use teal, pink and red fills with bold black outlines, and the shafts are wrapped with thread-like bands. Soft pink wash shading sits behind the arrows, with small coloured dots scattered along the shafts.

Neo-trad Forearm Arrow Feather Dot Thread

Find an artist for this

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

The dye pots were the first thing Nan Halloran kept from the men, because a fletcher who dyes her own feathers gets talked about in the wrong tone. Teal came from woad she bought off a carter, pink from madder roots dug behind the chapel wall, red from whatever the red was that year. She glued each vane with hide size and bound the shafts in waxed thread so the wood wouldn't split when a boy let go too hard.

Keep reading

The summer fair at Thornwick brought the archers in from three parishes, and her grandsons were bold about it. Tam wanted the long pair, the ones with the widest vanes, and he took them to the butts every morning before the milk was in. Eli got the smaller arrows, the ones she'd made from the offcuts, and he was told often enough that he couldn't hit a barn door from inside it. He said nothing. He only spent his evenings on the wall by the beck, pulling fletching loose and setting it again.

On the last morning of practice she came out with a jar of glass beads and a bodkin. Each arrow that struck true, she told them, got a bead slid down its shaft, and whoever had the most by noon would carry the prize pheasant home. Tam's beads came fast, then slowed as his arrows sank into the grass. Eli's little pair went into the straw one after another, dot after dot, until his shafts looked like something strung for a feast.

Tam lost the pheasant, and he came round to the workshop that night with his bow under his arm, sulking at the floor. Nan took his longer arrows from him, unwound a length of her own apron thread, and bound the split shaft again, tight as a pulse, while he watched her hands.