Hand-drawn tattoo design of two crossed arrows with red and dark feathered fletching and a thin wrapping line, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two crossed red feathered arrows with a wrapping line

Mixed · Flash

Two arrows cross vertically on a plain cream background, each with red and orange feathered fletching outlined in dark ink. A thin dark line, resembling a vine or snake, winds around the shafts between the feathers. The sketchy, textured shading gives the feathers a loose, painterly finish, and the design is centred with ample space around it.

Arrow Arrowhead Feather Crossed arrows

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you'll not hear me over the engine knock, and I'll not say it twice. Your great-grandfather kept a barge called the Heron on the Trent, and above her tiller he nailed two arrows crossed like a pair of folded hands. Red feathers, dyed with madder root he boiled in the galley copper, because the bargee's wife said a plain shaft was for men who never came home.

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Between the fletching a length of black gut wound the two shafts together, tight as a mooring line round a post. Nobody on the river could say who tied it. Some said a lock-keeper's daughter at Cromwell, who wanted the archers at Gunthorpe to shoot one arrow and then the other, never parted. Others said it was an eel line, pulled up below the weir, that would not let go of anything it had once wrapped.

The year the flood took the top lock, a young man came aboard wanting passage to Newark, his bow slung over one shoulder. He had lost his partner to the water, or so he said, and asked the old bargee to take the second arrow down from the wall. The old man refused. A pair kept together, he said, was a pair kept honest, and that gut would bite the hand that cut it.

The young man took the arrow anyway and went over the side at the lock gate, into the brown water. In the morning the bargee found the gut lying loose across the deck, cut clean, and one arrow back on its nail with its feathers still wet and red as a fresh graze. He never did say which of the two had been the one that wouldn't stay.