Gold fine line geometric drawing of a bow and arrow with a compass rose inside the curve, on a dark olive background, shown as a design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bow, arrow and compass design

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A gold line drawing of a bow with an arrow resting across it, with a compass rose and radiating guide lines filling the curve of the bow. The linework is thin and precise, built from straight lines, arcs and circles, with no shading. The design is shown in one gold ink on a plain dark olive background, centred in the frame.

Fine line Geometric Bow Arrow Compass Compass rose Geometric line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Okonedo-Price had been awake since four, bent over the drawing board in the back room of Harrow and Lisle, Instrument Makers, while the city outside ran on sodium light and the first buses sighed at the kerb. The bow on her table was not a weapon. Master Lisle had cut it from ash to hold a brass compass rose in its curve, so that a surveyor could sight along the arrow and read a bearing without moving his feet.

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The commission was for the Ardley Water Board, who wanted the old culvert under Canal Street mapped before they poured the new footings. Every line had to be true. Nell laid the rule against the guide lines, drew the radiating spokes out from the centre, and checked each arc twice with the dividers. Past one in the morning the streetlamps outside buzzed and dimmed in turn, and the rose on the paper looked like something that had been waiting a long time to be read.

At half past two she sighted along the arrow through the window. The bearing ran straight past the chimney of the old brewery, down the line of the culvert, and out to the dark strip of the river. The water board had marked the culvert a hundred yards east on their plans. She took up the rule and drew the true line instead, then sat back and watched the arrow lie across the bow, steady as a held breath, pointing at the one place in the city nobody had bothered to measure.