Hand-drawn flash design of seven decorative arrows in purple, teal, pink and navy on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seven coloured arrows in a row

Colour · Flash

Seven arrows are drawn in a vertical row, each with a different head and shaft. Some have chevron and dotted patterns, while others have simple crossed or knotted shafts, all in black linework. The arrows are filled with purple, teal, pink and navy ink on a plain white background.

Arrow Chevron Tribal pattern Bead Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Ashworth pinned the last feather to the shaft with a sliver of tallow and held the arrow up to the window to check its line. The workshop sat at the edge of Hollin Wood, where the trees stopped and the village began, and the light through the leaded panes always fell the same way across her bench. Seven orders were due before the Michaelmas fair. Her father's rule still hung on the wall in his square capitals: no two arrows alike in head or shaft, or the buyer will think you lazy.

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The teal ones went to the Pell brothers, who had shot true at every fair since they were boys and wanted their fletching to say so. The chevron-banded purple went to the miller's girl, who bragged she could split a hazel wand at forty paces. The knotted navy shaft was for Jonah Reeve, who never once missed a rabbit and never once paid on time. Mabel dyed the feathers herself in the copper pots out back, elderberry for purple, woad for navy, madder for the pink that she thought looked like a sunset over the mere.

The seventh arrow had no order slip. It was the plain blue one with the knot near its tip, and it had been on the peg since the spring, when a stranger in a grey cloak left it with a coin and said only that it would be fetched. Mabel had made it to the pattern her father had cut into the old board, and when she finished the fletching she found she could not bring herself to wrap it with the others.

She hung it on the nail beside the door, where the draught from the wood set its feathers stirring, and the village dogs, when they barked at dusk, always stopped at the gate to listen.