Three hand-drawn arrow designs in blue ink on lined notebook paper, one with a triangular head and fletching, one with a swirl near the shaft base, and one with a small outlined arrowhead.

Three arrow designs in blue pen

Fine line · Colour · Flash

Three simple arrow designs are drawn in blue ink on lined notebook paper, each running vertically down the page. The left arrow has a filled triangular head, small circles and a crossbar on the shaft, and feathered fletching at the base. The middle arrow has stacked chevron barbs, a cross mark and a looping swirl at the lower end, while the right arrow has an outlined triangular head, a row of dots and a small filled arrowhead above a feathered tail. The linework is thin and even with little shading, and the image is a single colour.

Fine line Arrow Arrowhead Fletching Feather Dot Swirl Cross Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your uncle chalked the three arrows on the slate by the Skerrow lifeboat house every morning before the fleet went out, and nobody on the quay ever asked what they meant, because everyone already knew. You were sixteen the summer he handed you the chalk and told you to do the middle one yourself. Straight up, he said, that's the channel. The little cross is a wreck, so keep off it. The coil at the bottom is where the tide turns on itself and drowns boats that think they're clever.

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You drew it badly the first time, the swirl lopsided like a dropped rope, and he rubbed it out with the heel of his hand and made you do it again. The feathers at the tail mattered, he said. Feathers meant the wind was behind you. Dots meant count the buoys. He never explained the triangle heads, only tapped them with a blackened thumb and said a head was for where you were going, not where you'd been.

The night the Marigold went missing off the Scarp, the slate was still there at dawn, its chalk smeared where the rain had come sideways. You stood in front of it in your oilskins with the radio muttering behind you and saw that someone had drawn the middle arrow again, the swirl bigger, the cross pressed hard enough to dent the board. Nobody had asked you to. Your uncle's hand had not been steady for a year.

You took the chalk from the ledge, wiped the cross away with your sleeve, and drew it again, straight up, the way he taught you. Then you went down to the slipway to wait for the boats, because somebody had to point the way home and the arrow was yours now.