Black line drawing of a fine-lined arrow above a block of text quoting a passage about focus and aiming.

Arrow tattoo design with quote

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A simple black drawing of an arrow with a pointed head and feathered fletching runs horizontally across a white background. Below it sits a paragraph of plain black text quoting a message about pulling back and keep aiming. The arrow is drawn with thin, even linework and no shading or colour.

Fine line Arrow Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told to draw the string back until the yew bends like a question, and Aldo Fenwick, who has made bows in the cold shed above Hebden Gate for forty years, will not let you loose until your shoulder shakes. "Feel it dragging," he says, tapping the back of your arm with a bent finger. "That's the valley wanting you to stay put."

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The pass is a ribbon of scree above the reservoir, and every October the wind comes off the tops and shoves the carters back down to the village. You hate that wind. You say so, loudly, and Aldo only hands you a bundle of cut ash shafts and a tin of goose feathers. Three to a fletch, he tells you, cut at the same slant so the arrow spins true. Otherwise it wobbles in the air like a drunk man on a stile.

In the third week of snow, Wren Lowther climbs the pass alone with a letter for the far farm, and the gusts knock her back twice on the switchback. You are standing at the lip of the cutting with one of Aldo's arrows when you see her hat go over the edge. You draw until the wood creaks and the cold bites your teeth, then you loose not at the ridge but across the gully, where the shaft sails over her head and skewers a rock on the far side. A length of linen cord snakes after it.

She hauls herself up hand over hand, swearing like a carter. Below, Aldo is coiling the slack on the lower path. He does not look up. He only wipes the fletching clean on his sleeve and holds out the next shaft, already nocked.