A sight mark means nothing on anybody else's bow

A small card, curled at the corners from tape and weather. Five distances down one side: 18m, 30m, 50m, 70m, 90m. A setting beside each: 5.2, 6.8, 8.4, 10.1, 12.6.

The 70m row is circled in red. Nothing else on the card explains why.

Somebody else could pick up this exact bow, these exact arrows, and the card would tell them nothing at all.

What is this card actually recording?

The sight position that puts an arrow on target at each of five distances, for one bow and one set of arrows only.

An arrow doesn't fly flat — it drops on a curve, and the curve is steeper the further out the target sits, so the sight has to move for every distance rather than sitting in one place all day. 5.2 at 18m and 12.6 at 90m aren't two versions of the same number scaled up. They're five separate answers to five separate questions, worked out once and then taped down so they never have to be worked out again.

Why does it have to be written down at all?

Because five numbers are exactly the amount a person forgets under pressure, and there's no way to recalculate them standing on the line.

Getting from a bare bow to these five figures took a session of shooting groups at each distance and nudging the sight until the arrows landed centre. That work happens once, in practice, with time to be wrong and correct it. On a shoot day there's no spare time and no group of arrows to burn on a guess — the card exists so the number the archer needs is already known before the bow comes up, the same reason a runner tapes a plan to their wrist rather than trying to do arithmetic mid-race.

What decision does an archer actually make with a card like this?

Which distances earn a row.

18, 30, 50, 70 and 90 metres cover most of what an indoor and outdoor season actually asks for, but the exact list is personal — a different round shoots different distances, and a card only needs the rows that get used. Circling 70m here marks the distance that gets shot most often, not the one that matters most in the abstract; a different archer's card would circle a different row for exactly the same reason.

Can a real club's target face or a sponsor's mark go on this?

If a specific club or sponsor is the point, ask them — a club's target design, a national team's kit or a sponsor's logo belongs to whoever registered it, and that kind of mark gets licensed for apparel all the time.

Where the point isn't a specific club, the invented card works just as well, because a sight mark is calibrated equipment, not branding — it belongs to the archer who shot the groups that produced it, and there's nothing about that process that needs anybody else's name on it.

Does the same idea work for a different discipline or as a gift?

Yes — a compound bow's card looks different from a recurve's, but the structure underneath is the same: distances down one side, a number beside each, one row that gets circled.

As a gift for someone starting the sport, a card with fewer rows and no circle yet is the honest version — the calibration hasn't happened for them, and pretending otherwise would be printing someone else's numbers. The blank version says exactly as much as the full one does about where this particular archer is.

Isn't a strip of numbers a strange thing to want on a shirt?

Less strange than it looks, once you notice what it's replacing: a page of working-out that happened once and is never repeated.

The card is the entire distance between a guess and a shot, and it took hours of practice to compress into five figures — the same kind of specific, unglamorous groundwork that turns a climb profile taped to a stem into something worth reading mid-race. Nobody sees the sessions that produced the numbers. The card is what's left.

Does it print well?

Yes — five flat numerals against a plain field, with one red for the circled row.

Skip the curled, taped-up look of the card itself; that texture reads as clutter on fabric rather than authenticity. Set the five rows evenly spaced and the same size, with only the red circle breaking the pattern — the eye should land on 70m the way it lands on the real card, and nowhere else.

How do I get one made?

Describe your card at JustOG — the distances, the settings, and which row gets circled. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Five numbers, taped to a limb, that would mean nothing on any bow but this one.