Modifying material properties at the nanoscale is crucially important for devices in nano-electronics, nanophotonics and quantum information. Optically active defects in wide band gap materials, for instance, are critical constituents for the realisation of quantum technologies. Here, we demonstrate the use of recoil implantation, a method exploiting momentum transfer from accelerated ions, for versatile and mask-free material doping. As a proof of concept, we direct-write arrays of optically active defects into diamond via momentum transfer from a Xe+ focused ion beam (FIB) to thin films of the group IV dopants pre-deposited onto a diamond surface. We further demonstrate the flexibility of the technique, by implanting rare earth ions into the core of a single mode fibre. We conclusively show that the presented technique yields ultra-shallow dopant profiles localised to the top few nanometres of the target surface, and use it to achieve sub-50 nm positional accuracy. The method is applicable to non-planar substrates with complex geometries, and it is suitable for applications such as electronic and magnetic doping of atomically-thin materials and engineering of near-surface states of semiconductor devices.