The sign-here arrow sticker

Peel one from its backing sheet and it curls slightly before flattening against the page, a translucent arrow in flag orange or red, printed once with the words sign here and an arrowhead pointing at whatever line it has been pressed beside. Its adhesive is deliberately weak, calibrated to lift cleanly off paper without tearing the surface beneath, since the sticker's entire purpose ends the moment the pen does. Mortgage closings can use thirty or forty in a single stack of documents, a small procession of orange flags marching down the margin of pages nobody reads in full, each one silently vouching that yes, this is the spot, sign here, and not two lines up where a signature would mean something different and considerably less convenient for the party who placed the flag. Once signed, most are peeled away and discarded within the hour, though some survive by accident, folded into the document and rediscovered months later stuck faintly to a page it no longer belongs on. Its shape has stayed remarkably consistent across manufacturers: a pointed tail, a flat flag body, uppercase text sized to be visible without close reading. There is a smaller, more polite variant used for initials, and a rarer version that says sign and date, doing the work of two lines with one sticker. Nobody has ever framed one. Nobody has ever kept one on purpose. It exists entirely inside the transaction and is gone the moment the transaction is confirmed, leaving no trace once the signature line has been filled.

H. G. Plimsoll