I stole an Elven Bow from Aela the Huntress from her room and it's my main weapon of choice now after upgrading it at the grindstone and then enchating it.

At first I sold it to my Theives Guild fence, Tonilia. Then bought it back. That didn't work. Then I sold it to her again and left The Ragged Flagon and returned immediately, to see if a loading screen would make it not stolen.

When that wasn't working, I went to Ri'saad, the cat merchant who fences things for me.

When that also didn't work, I reverse pickpocted it into a bandit then killed the bandit.

When that too didn't work, I put it into a few merchant chests and then went back to the merchant to see if they would finally sell it back, but nope.

Then I finally upgraded it at a grindstone and enchanted it, and renaming it. Then I tried everything again and that still didn't work.

As soon as I can figure out how to get the ''Stolen'' tag off of this thing I'm going to start doing the Main Quest for the first time. This is probably going to be my best bow for several hours of gameplay and I was hoping to make it ''mine''.

It may be a glitch, infact it sounds like one, have you tried to save the game, then get arrested, wait out the sentence and see if it is given back? If it isnt there anymore it is safe ro say it is stolen still, also when it is outside or your inventory, is it in red text?

Revert to before you got arrested, then possible reverse pickpocket the bow back to her and finish thw companions quest to make her a follower?

I'll do all that now

There is a barrel in Dragonsreach that if you put stolen stuff into it, then have a follower take it out of there, it'll remove the stolen tag.

I'll look it up in a few hours, I'm going to start the MQ now and get a follower from that. Do you know which barrell? Because getting arrested showed that it is indeed still considered stolen, I pilfered it from the evidence locker and tried to launder it through a fence again but no luck

edit,

You edited with the location, thanks.

It worked! Thanks