Twelve hand-drawn black ink arrow designs in a row on a notebook page, with chevron, triangle and feather details, beside a patterned page edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand-drawn arrow designs in a notebook

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A notebook page shows a column of twelve hand-drawn arrows, each pointing left or right with varied fletching and arrowheads. The arrowheads include triangles, chevrons, feather shapes and small dots, drawn in fine black ink with a mix of solid and outlined fills. The plain paper background and the patterned page on the left edge make the sketches the clear focus.

Geometric Arrow Arrowhead Chevron Triangle Feather Dot Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Monday, and the platform clock at Harrowgate Junction has been wrong since the storm. I have spent my lunch hour copying arrows into the back of my father's old pocket notebook, because Mrs Ashdown in the ticket office said the signal men once marked the rails with arrows of their own, and nobody has ever kept the drawings. I have drawn twelve so far. The long one at the bottom has a feather tail and a single nick across its shaft, which I think means the 4.15 to Leeds, though I may be inventing it.

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This morning Ashdown found me on the bench and sat down without asking. She said my father drew arrows too, the same ones, always with the triangle heads turned sideways, and that he used to point them at the empty sidings when the waiting got long. She did not say where he went. She only tapped the top arrow, the one pointing left with the dotted shaft, and said it was the direction you go when you have decided to stop going forward.

I have not decided anything. The 4.15 came in at twenty past five, its lamps swimming in the wet, and I watched it take on passengers and pull out with the steam still hanging over the points. Then I turned to a clean page and drew one more arrow, pointing right, with three small chevrons on its fletching and a triangle head no bigger than a fingernail. I left it where it fell in the ink, and went home by the footbridge.