Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of three arrows with feathers and dots on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour arrows on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bundle of three arrows with feathered fletching runs diagonally across the upper arm, with a few small dots and a triangle nearby. The shapes have soft, bleeding edges and loose washes of blue, green, red, orange and purple rather than solid outlines. The arm fills most of the frame against a blurred indoor background.

Upper arm Arrow Feather Dot Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on the Saturday market at Thornwick since before the stalls opened, and Mags Tolley had given up trying to keep her dyes dry. She sold arrows from a trestle under a tarpaulin that sagged like a wet sail. Her fletchings were goose and pheasant, coloured in pots she mixed herself: madder red, woad blue, a green made from nettle and copper, and an orange she would not name to anyone.

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A boy came by with a coin wrapped in a handkerchief and asked for one arrow for his grandfather, who had shot the same yew bow for fifty years and could no longer draw it. Mags said she had no single arrows straight enough to sell. Instead she bound three together with waxed thread, one blue, one red, one green, and when she handed them over the feathers had already begun to bleed into one another where the rain had found them.

The boy frowned. "Grandad will say these are for hunting something."

"A bundle of three goes where a single will not," Mags said, the way her mother had said it at this same trestle. "One for the thing you aim at. One for the wind you forget. One for the hand that lets go." She pointed at the little dots of colour scattered beside the bundle, which had dripped from her brush and dried in the damp, and at the blue triangle she had painted on the tarpaulin pole years ago so she would know where her stall stood.

The boy paid with the wet coin and ran off through the puddles. That evening Mags found her fingers stained blue, red and green, and the marks would not wash away. She stopped scrubbing and let them run down her wrist, the way the feathers had run in the rain, and went home still smelling of nettles and copper.