Fine line arrows on a forearm

There was a fletcher at the high house above the Vell pass, a man called Osric, who made arrows for the abbot's hunt and for nothing else. He kept five shafts on the rack by his door, each finished in its own way. One had a plain triangular head, filed thin as a tongue. One wore the grey feathers of a heron, one the brown of a wren, and two he had bound with no feathers at all, only little fletched cuts of wood that looked like the tips of pine boughs. He said a bow needs a variety of voices, and that each shaft would find its mark in its own fashion.

The abbot grew impatient. He wanted one true arrow, not five, and sent the boy Tobias up the mountain to ask which was best. Osric took the boy out to the terrace where two young pines stood against the wall, planted by the first brothers. He drew each arrow in turn and loosed it east over the valley. Four fell short in the scree. The fifth, the one with the pine-bough fletching, sailed clean over the gorge and struck the nearer tree at the height of a man's heart, and the shaft stayed there, quivering.

Tobias ran down with the news. The abbot was furious, then quiet, and he had the fletcher bring the other four to the tree as well, one by one, until the trunk bristled like a hedgehog. By spring the pines had grown around the shafts, and you can still see them if you are willing to climb. The wood has swallowed every one. Mind your step on the way down; the path there is older than any of us.