Black pen sketch of a fine line arrow design with a feathered tail, a looped bow motif and a spiral, drawn on lined notebook paper.

Arrow with feather fletching and bow motif

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink pen drawing of a horizontal arrow with a leaf-like arrowhead on the left and a feathered fletching on the right. At the centre sits a looped bow or knot motif with a small spiral curling beneath it, and a few small dots and diamonds mark the shaft. The thin, even linework is drawn on lined notebook paper with no shading or colour.

Fine line Arrow Feather Bow Knot Spiral Arrowhead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishwives of Carrick Nab said the arrow came in on the spring tide, the year the herring failed. It was a plain ash shaft with a leaf-shaped head of bronze at one end and three grey feathers bound at the other, and it was caught in a crab pot off the breakwater as if someone had meant it to be found. Ruth Penhallow hauled it over the rail and carried it up to her father, who had once been a bowyer's boy and knew good work when he held it.

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He turned it over in the lamplight and found a knot of tarred cord tied at the middle, a loop that crossed itself twice and then curled back on a small spiral, like the tail of a sleeping cat. He said no bowman in Carrick would tie a knot like that without a reason. Ruth asked what reason, and he only shook his head and said the arrow would tell her when it was ready, the way they always did.

She hung it on a nail above the net loft and went about her work. Each morning the cord had slipped a finger's width along the shaft, so the knot ran a little nearer the bronze head. Some of the older women said it pointed where the herring had gone. Ruth thought it pointed at the sea, and she stopped watching the water and started watching the knot.

By the first frost the cord had reached the bronze and would go no further. Ruth took the arrow down, carried it to the end of the breakwater, and laid it on the wet stones with its point to the open water. In the morning the knot was gone, the tide was running out, and the three grey feathers were still bound at the tail, bright as the day they were tied.