Five black arrow flash designs stacked vertically on a white background, each with different fletching and arrowhead shapes.

Five black arrow designs in a column

Black and grey · Flash

Five arrow designs are drawn in solid black silhouette and stacked vertically on a plain white background. The fletching ranges from chevron feathers to plain points, and the arrowheads vary from filled triangles to an open outline and a leaf shape. Each arrow uses a thin straight shaft running left to right, with no shading or colour.

Arrow Arrowhead Fletching Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae Corran had the order book open on the cabin table when the lock keeper's boy came shouting along the towpath. Five arrows, the note said, for the Harrowgate shoot, and every one of them to be different. Her father would have tossed the paper into the cut. She read it twice instead, then dragged the tray of heads out from under the bunk, where the damp couldn't reach them.

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She began with the plain one, a flat blade of blackened steel that she filed until the edge threw back the lamplight. The second wanted a diamond point, and the third a broad chevron of goose feathers cut from a bundle that smelled of the mere. The fourth she made as a leaf, fletched with only two feathers, which her father had always called a cheat. Lamp oil, hot glue, the slow tick of the stove. The fifth was the odd one, an open outline of a head, hollow as a sip of wind.

When the boy came back at dusk she had tied them in a row with waxed thread, shafts aligned so the heads sat in a column against the grey water. He frowned at them. "They're all different," he said. "That's the point," Mae said. "Each one for a different man who thinks he knows what a target is." He tucked them under one arm and went off up the towpath.

She found the open-headed arrow on the table after he had gone, its feathers still bright. She slid it into her apron pocket without deciding to. Outside, the lock gates groaned open, and the water lifted the barge gently and carried the last of the light away down the cut.