Watercolour illustration of several crossed arrows with bright feathered fletching in pink, blue, yellow and green on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour arrows and feathers

Colour · Flash

Four arrows with feathered fletching are arranged in staggered pairs across the image, with the shafts crossing and the tips pointing in alternating directions. The feathers are painted in loose watercolour washes in pink, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, with soft bleeding edges and no hard outlines. Small paint splatters in matching colours surround the arrows on a plain white background.

Arrow Feather Watercolour Paint splatter

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

Right, gather round, gather round, and mind the paint on your sleeves, because the Marigold Travelling Archery Booth has pitched on the Hartlepool front for one week only and Madame Vesna has been up since five painting the feathers on. Four arrows, see, and not one of them straight, which is the whole trick. Watch the pink one there. Twelve pounds of prize money if any of you can tell me where it lands, and nobody ever can, because the shafts cross over in the air like a pair of gossiping aunts and the tips point every which way they please.

Keep reading

So there was a lad called Tomasz Kowal, nineteen and cocky as a rooster, who swore he could shoot through the gap between the green and the yellow feathers at forty paces. Madame Vesna only smiled and dipped her brush in the rinse water, and the whole booth went orange and purple where the colour ran off into the sea. He drew, he loosed, and the arrow went wide, wide as a seagull's temper, straight into the splash of blue paint on the back board. Splat. The board never looked the same after. Neither did Tomasz, who came back every evening for a fortnight to buy one more go, and never once hit the gap.

The last night, the wind came in off the harbour and the arrows all shivered at once. Madame Vesna took his bow from him and put it down. Stop aiming, she said, and he did, and the pink arrow slid clean through the place he had been trying to reach for a fortnight. That is the secret, my darlings. Not the gap. The wind. Now who wants a go?