Black hand-drawn ampersand design with an arrow forming its lower tail, shown as a flash design on a white card against pale wood.

Ampersand with arrow tail design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ampersand whose lower stroke extends into an arrow with a feathered head and a barbed tip. The linework is bold and slightly textured, with solid black fill and no shading. The design is centred on a plain white card set on a pale weathered wood background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit yourself down by the stove, because this is a story about a sign-painter and a bit of spite, and I'll not tell it standing up. Harrowby in the spring of 1954 had three shops with painted names above the door, and only one of them was painted by Walter Fenn, who did the lettering for half the county from a tin shed behind the Co-op. He was a careful man. He measured twice and mixed his black with linseed till it shone like a boot.

Keep reading

Then Mrs Dorothy Lark came in with a bundle of letters in her apron pocket and asked him to make her ampersand special. Her husband, Tom, had left the saddlery for a lorry job in Leeds, and she wanted the shop sign to read Lark & Daughter, though there was no daughter yet. Walter said an ampersand was an ampersand. She said she wanted it to look like it meant something.

So he tried. He drew the loop of it fat and round, then let the lower stroke run long and sharp, and before he knew what his hand was doing it had thrown an arrow off the end, feathered at the back, barbed at the point. It looked like a thing you'd be shot with. Dorothy laughed till she had to sit on the step. She said, that's Tom all over, always leaving in a hurry.

Walter painted it that way. Dorothy hung the sign. Tom never came back from Leeds, but a daughter did arrive the following winter, and the arrow pointed down Station Road, straight at the line where the trains went out. I've walked past it a hundred times. The paint's flaked now, but if you stand where Dorothy stood, the arrow still points you the way the lorry went.

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