Pencil sketch of two crossed arrows with the words BE, AND, STILL and KNOW set around the crossing point, a lettering-led tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Crossed arrows with 'Be still and know' lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black pencil drawing of two arrows crossing in an X, with arrowheads at the top and fletching at the bottom. The words BE, AND, STILL and KNOW are hand-lettered in the four spaces around the crossing point, in plain uneven capitals. The image is monochrome on a pale background, with light shading on the shafts and feathers.

Lettering Arrow Crossed arrows Lettering Word Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and pass that jug along before my throat seizes up, because this is the story of Hob and Wat Marrow, who were the worst pair of shots the Fenmoor parish ever bred.

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They quarrelled from the cradle. Every summer they took their bows to the butts behind the church, and every summer each tried to outshoot the other, pulling tighter and loosing sooner, until one arrow took the miller's pear tree and the other sailed clean over the wall into Mrs Penhallow's washing. Their mother, who made arrows for the whole hundred, grew tired of paying for the mending. One wet evening she laid a shaft of Hob's beside a shaft of Wat's on her bench, crossed them like a pair of scissors, and said, 'You'll shoot when you can be still enough to hear the mark tell you where it is. Not before.'

They laughed at her, and then they went out to the marsh and tried. It took them the whole winter. Hob learned to stand in the reeds until the heron came back to its post. Wat learned to hold his breath until his heart went quiet. By spring neither of them could be startled by anything.

Then the Ouse broke its bank in March, and Wat was out on the causeway with a cart of sheep when the water came up over the stones. Hob did not run. He stood in the flood up to his belt, still as the old post, and listened until he heard his brother's whistle. He sent one arrow across the current with a rope tied to its shaft, and it landed on the barn roof where Wat could reach it. That was the last shot they ever made together.

So when you see those arrows painted over the lintel of the Marrow barn tonight, remember the bench, and the crossing, and the still water. Now, bride, you'll have to hold very still for the ring, and that's the hardest part of the whole business, believe me.