Pen drawing of an arrow design with the words follow your and Arrow on a kraft card with a purple and turquoise watercolour wash, suitable as a tattoo flash sketch.

Arrow design with script on kraft card

Mixed · Flash

A pen-drawn arrow runs vertically down the centre of the card, with a triangular head wrapped by a loop and a feathered fletching at the base, shaded with hatching. The words follow your appear above it and Arrow below, both in handwritten script. The arrow sits over a loose watercolour wash of purple and turquoise on brown kraft card, so the ink is grey-black and the wash is colour.

Arrow Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobiah Ward kept the shooting booth at the back of Mallow's Travelling Fair, where the painted sky went blue-green at dusk and the ground smelled of wet sawdust. One October a girl called Nell Greaves came to him with a bundle of goose feathers and a fletcher's knife, asking for work. He told her the fair had no room for a girl who could not hit the board.

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She hit it the next morning, three times out of three, though she did not aim the way he did. She stood with her weight on the back foot, looked at the tent poles and the smoke and the way the lamplight bent on the canvas, and then she loosed. "The arrow goes where it's wanted," she said. Ward laughed until he saw she was serious. Each evening after that she cut a shaft from ash, bound the head with waxed thread, and set three feathers at a slant so the thing spun true as it flew.

In spring the fair was sold to a man from Bristol who wanted the booth gone and a wheel put in its place. Nell took her arrows, her knife, and a sheet of brown kraft card Ward had given her for keeping score. On the road north she washed the card with river water and crushed bluebell, so the colour pooled purple, then turned to turquoise where the light fell. She drew one arrow down the middle and wrote a word above it and another below, so she would know which way to walk when the roads split.

At every fork she propped the card against a fence post and waited for the wind to lift the feathers. Years later Ward heard she kept a stall in a harbour town, selling cards like hers to fishermen's children. When a boy asked her why the arrow pointed at nothing in particular, she said it had been pointing the whole time, and that she had only needed to stop long enough to notice.