Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an arrow running diagonally through a flame-like shape, with the words hope and fear in script across the shaft.

Arrow with hope and fear script sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper of a tattoo design: an arrow runs diagonally from the lower left to the upper right, with a feathered or flame-like shape behind its middle. The words hope and fear are written in flowing script along the shaft, and a small spiky burst is sketched to the right. The lines are single-weight and grey, with light shading, and there is no colour.

Lettering Arrow Flame Script Hope Fear Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every wedding in Wennock Vale got a gift from the bowyer, and the gift was always an arrow. On the morning Marta Cole married the miller's son, old Edric Hale walked up the lane with one under his arm, its feathers still pale from the goose. He gave it to the groom at the lychgate and said nothing at all, which was not like him.

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The groom turned it over in the sunlight. Two words had been burned into the ash shaft, one above the other, the first in looping letters and the second in something harder. "Hope," he read, and then, with less confidence, "fear." Edric shrugged. "A man ought to know what he is aiming at," he said, and went in to find the ale.

The mill flooded in the third winter. Water came up through the floorboards and took two sacks of seed and the good millstone's cover, and the miller's son sat up nights with his head in his hands, saying the word fear the way other men say a curse. Marta took the arrow down from its nail above the hearth. She ran her thumb over the two burned words and found the first worn smooth from handling, the second barely touched.

She said nothing to him. In the morning she carried the arrow down to the sluice and wedged it into the crack of the old gate, fletching up, where the water had to pass it. It held. By spring the feathers had gone grey, and the first word was still the one they read every morning on their way to the mill.