Black and grey flash drawing of an arrow with an infinity symbol wrapped around its shaft, in a fine line sketch style with hatched fletching.

Arrow with infinity symbol design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single arrow runs horizontally across a white background, with hatched feathered fletching on the left and a solid, shaded arrowhead on the right. An infinity symbol is looped around the middle of the shaft. The linework is pen-like with light hatching and shading in black and grey, and the design is centred with generous white space around it.

Fine line Arrow Infinity symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Rendle, fletcher of Coldharbour Mill, bound a loop of waxed linen round the middle of every shaft he made, and would not say why. Folk took it for a maker's mark. His daughter Nell took it for a question she could never quite ask, and she watched him tie the loop a thousand times before she thought to ask it again.

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The summer the lord's men came to the mill wanting a bow fitted, Nell took a shaft from her father's bench and tied the knot herself, and tied it wrong. She let the loop twist one turn too many, so it lay on its side like a figure eight that had lost its way. Her father found it at dusk and said nothing at first. He sat down on the upturned barrel and breathed slowly for a while.

'A knot that goes round forever has no start and no finish,' he said at last. 'A thing tied so cannot be cut loose from its own beginning. Your mother taught me that. She had it from the bowyer's widow down the river, who had it from someone who never gave their name.' Nell asked what became of the arrow. He told her it flew true for forty years and was never once lost in the reeds.

The loop still hangs on a nail above the bench. Nell keeps it there. Each new apprentice is handed a shaft in their first week and shown the knot, and told to tie it in one pass, because the mill learned long ago that a loop started twice comes out crooked for good.