A flash sheet of fourteen hand-drawn arrows in blue ink on white, in varied shades and fletching styles, with no body placement shown.

Blue ink arrow designs in a column

Colour · Flash

The image shows a column of fourteen arrows drawn in blue ink on a plain white background, with arrows pointing both left and right. The linework is loose and hand-drawn, with fletching rendered as layered strokes and some arrowheads filled solid while others are outlined. The ink varies from pale to deep blue, giving the sheet a watercolour-like tonal range.

Arrow Fletching Arrowhead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sorting hall at Thessaly Reach smells of hot solder and wet wool, and the relay drones come in off the dark side of the ring every twelve minutes with their brass fletching clicking. You are fourteen, and the job your aunt gave you is to read them. Each drone carries a small ribbon of blue light along its spine, and the ribbon points either towards the cargo lift or away from it. Your aunt says the ribbons were painted by hand before the ring was built, in a workshop on a farm that no longer exists, and that the old cartographers used such marks to show which way a river ran.

Keep reading

The column on the dispatch office wall is a copy of that old sheet, fourteen arrows inked in blue, some solid, some hollow, and nobody has ever agreed what the differences mean. Where the ink is palest, the drone is empty and heading out. Where it goes deep, the drone is full and coming home. On the morning the lift jammed, you traced the column with your thumb and counted the arrows that pointed left. Eight. Six pointed right. Your aunt said the wall was wrong, and you said it had been wrong for years, and she laughed for the first time since the funeral.

So you took a torch and a slate down to the cold bay and started reading the drones by hand instead of by the wall. The third one you opened held a sealed packet with no address on it, only a single grey feather pressed between two sheets of plastic. It was the lightest thing you had ever lifted. You understood then that the arrows were never telling you where the cargo went. They were telling you which way someone had decided it should travel.

You copied the feather into your own ledger in the same blue ink, pale at the quill and deep at the tip, and sent the packet up the lift towards the left-hand arrow. Then you wrote your name beneath the fourteenth mark on the wall, in your aunt's careful hand as much as your own, and went to see whether the lift had come free.