Small arrow tattoo on a foot

The shaft came off the bench at ten past eleven, and I was still at it because the lamp over the yard has been humming all week and I can't sleep with a noise like that. I had the vanes glued and bound, three of them cut from a goose wing I bought off the man at Hessle Road, and I was checking the straightness the old way, rolling it along the bench under my palm. It runs true. It always runs true when nobody asks it to be anything more.

The boy who comes past the shutters on Thursdays stopped under the window this evening with his cardboard sledge and asked whether an arrow that went nowhere was still an arrow. I said that depended on whether anyone had let it go. He said nobody had, so I said then it was only a drawing, and he looked so let down that I went to the back and fetched him the spare shaft, the plain one, with no nock cut yet.

When I came down this morning the door to the workshop was open and the shaft was gone. I found it sticking out of the lintel above the bakery across the road, point toward the sea, fletching snapped clean off the tail. Somebody had pulled the string back a long way to do that. The bakery light was already on, the way it is at four, and the dough women were shouting through the grille about the flour.

I've left the bow hanging where he can see it. Come up at the weekend if you can. I'll show you how the boy aims, which is not at anything at all.