Black geometric compass and arrow tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and arrow on a wrist

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a circular compass rose with a dotted and segmented face, crossed by an arrow whose head and fletching are drawn as angular triangles. The linework is solid and even, with the shaded areas of the compass built from dense black fill and hatching. The photograph is taken at a close angle of the inner forearm against a neutral background, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry is already leaving when you reach the slipway, so you stand on the wet stones and watch its wake fold itself flat against the breakwater. Behind you the island keeps its own time. The shutters are down on the shop that sells fishing line and postcards of puffins, and the only light is the one in the old lookout, where Morag Lyle has been waiting since Tuesday with her brass compass and a tin of sharpened pencils.

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She does not look up when you climb the stairs. She is drawing the rose again, the same eight points, each one dotted where the tide ought to be. "Your father left this," she says, and slides across the table a sheet of tracing paper. His arrow is there in blocky angles, its fletching cut like folded card. "He always said the arrow was for going out and the compass was for coming back. He never bothered to say which was which."

You turn the paper over. On the back, in faint pencil, is a bearing: north-west by a quarter north, and beneath it a single word crossed out twice. You hold it to the window. The sea is a flat grey mirror now, and the ferry has shrunk to a smudge heading the wrong way for anyone who wanted to stay.

You fold the tracing paper into your coat and take a pencil from her tin. Under the crossed-out word you write the one you actually mean. Morag nods as if you have passed a test she never set, and above you the great lamp begins, very slowly, to turn.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.