Black ink lettering design reading thankful and grateful, joined by a horizontal arrow with a feathered tail and open head, drawn in a hand-lettered script style.

Thankful and grateful arrow lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows the words thankful and grateful in loose, hand-lettered script, split above and below a thin horizontal arrow. The arrow has a feathered fletching at the left and an open triangular head at the right, with an ampersand sitting on the shaft between the two words. The linework is solid black on a plain white background with no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Lettering Arrow Script Ampersand Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fletcher of Harrowmere had one rule, and he bellowed it over the whine of the whetstone every morning: a shaft that flies true must be feathered by someone who means it. You had been sweeping his floor for three winters before he let you near the good goose feathers, the grey-barred ones carried down from the Marrow fens in sacks that smelled of salt and rain.

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That autumn the steward of Castle Ondry ordered twelve arrows for the Harvest Shoot and asked for nothing but the fletcher's mark on each. The old man refused. He wrote two words on a scrap of parchment, pushed it across the bench, and told you to cut them into the shafts. Thankful above, grateful below, and a little bridge between them where the line of the arrow ran straight through. "Mind the ampersand," he said. "It's the only part that holds the rest together."

The shoot came at dusk, the orchard gold and the bowstrings singing. Twelve shafts left the Ondry lawns and twelve stuck in the straw at the far butts, and the steward's clerks walked out to read them one by one. Nobody laughed at the words. A ploughman at the back of the crowd took off his cap and held it against his chest, as though someone had called his name.

The fletcher died before the spring thaw. You kept the scrap of parchment, and when you cut your own first arrow you wrote the same two words with a steadier hand, setting the little bridge exactly where he had shown you.