Black and grey tattoo of a compass rose with an arrow through a dreamcatcher-style ring and hanging feathers, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and dreamcatcher on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a compass rose with N, E, S and W labels around a circular dreamcatcher-style ring, with an arrow passing through its centre and feathers hanging below. The linework is solid black with grey shading inside the ring and on the feathers. The design is centred on the forearm against a dark, blurred background.

Geometric Forearm Compass Dreamcatcher Arrow Feather

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the village of Harl Cross the wind came from the west every morning and nobody trusted it. Old Edith Wray kept a ring of willow hung over her door, woven tight as a sieve, and she said it caught bad dreams before they reached the sleepers. Her grandson Tom, who was nine and bored, asked what it caught when the wind was good.

Keep reading

She showed him the compass she kept in a biscuit tin: brass, a cracked glass face, a needle that swung and never settled. The arrow tied across it had been her husband's, shot from the church field the summer the lorries came through and the crows went quiet. Feathers from the rookery hung below, one for each winter since. Tom asked why the needle would not point north. Edith said north was only where people agreed to look.

When fog came down over the moor road that November, the carrier's van went missing with the doctor's medicine aboard. Tom remembered the needle and the arrow. He carried the tin to the stile, held it flat as his grandmother had taught him, and let the arrow swing until it stopped on the gap in the wall. He walked the road along that line, calling out the way Edith did, and the driver followed his voice out of the white.

Edith never asked for thanks. The next morning she unhooked the willow ring and hung it over the boy's bed, and the wind, for once, came in from the east and smelled of bread.