Arrow (symbol)

Pedro Reinel in c. 1505 first used the fleur-de-lis as indicating north in a compass rose; the convention of marking the eastern direction with a cross is older (medieval).

An early arrow symbol is found in an illustration of Bernard Forest de Bélidor's treatise L'architecture hydraulique, printed in France in 1737.

In a further refinement of the symbol, John Richard Green's A Short History of the English People of 1874 contained maps by cartographer Emil Reich, which indicated army movements by curved lines, with solid triangular arrowheads placed intermittently along the lines.

The double-headed arrow representing logical equivalence was introduced by Albrecht Becker in Die Aristotelische Theorie der Möglichkeitsschlüsse, Berlin, 1933.

Arrows are regularly used in contemporary graffiti designs, incorporated as an element in both simplistic tags and complex wildstyle pieces.

[6] The graffiti theoretician RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ described adornments, such as arrows, in wildstyle paintings as ornaments that ‘armed’ the letters of a piece.

Additional arrows can be found in the Combining Diacritical Marks, Combining Diacritical Marks Extended, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms, Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Miscellaneous Technical, Modifier Tone Letters and Spacing Modifier Letters Unicode blocks.