Black ink sketches of a dozen arrows with varied tribal-style heads and feathered tails, drawn on a sketchbook page, with no body placement shown.

Hand-drawn arrow designs in a sketchbook

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A sketchbook page with twelve hand-drawn arrows in black ink, each running horizontally with a different arrowhead and fletching. The heads include triangles, chevrons, feathers and diamonds, and some shafts carry tick marks or dots. The linework is even and the page is plain white, with a patterned doodle along the left edge.

Geometric Arrow Arrowhead Feather Chevron Triangle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sketchbook was the only thing my uncle left that didn't need a solicitor to explain it. Twelve arrows ran down one page, every one pointing a different way, and along the margin a doodled river wandered off the edge as if it had somewhere better to be. I had the book open on the bonnet of my van outside the depot in Salford, the engine ticking as it cooled, sodium lamps turning everything the colour of weak tea.

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Uncle Frank drove night deliveries for a print works for thirty years and never once got lost, which he said was because he drew the route first. Each job got an arrow. Triangle heads marked the loading bays with the bad step, chevrons marked the gates that stuck, and a feathered tail meant the lane behind the chapel where the lamp had been out since before I was born. I had assumed the sketches were doodles until I checked the arrow with tick marks along its shaft. It pointed straight at the canal bridge where he had gone through the railing in March.

I drove there at two in the morning with the book on the passenger seat. The thinnest arrow, the one with a feathered head, didn't point at the bridge at all but underneath it, to a stone step at the water's edge that I had never noticed. I climbed down with a torch and found a tin of boiled sweets wedged in a crack, and beneath it a print run ticket dated the week before the accident. On the back, in his square capitals, he had written NOT YET.

I sat on that step until the canal went grey and the first lorries started rumbling over the bridge above me. Then I drew one more arrow at the bottom of the last page, pointing home, and gave its shaft three small ticks, one for each night I had driven past this place without asking him where he was going.