Black ink compass rose with feathers and compass point letters on the back of a hand, over a pink and green watercolour wash.

Compass and feathers on the back of a hand

Geometric · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits at the centre of the back of a hand, with the letters N, NE, E, SE, S, SW and W around its edge and two feather outlines below. The linework is loose and sketchy, with some scattered dots and short strokes. Soft pink and green watercolour washes sit behind the design, and a patterned silver ring is worn on one finger against a grey background.

Geometric Lettering Hand Compass Compass rose Feather Letter Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By four in the morning the flour was always gone, and Mrs Pargeter sent me out to the yard with a torch and a bucket of cold starter. 'Don't come back until you know which way the wind is,' she said, and shut the bakehouse door on the smell of scorched sugar. The fog had come up from the harbour overnight and sat on the bins like wet wool. Gulls were still asleep on the chimney stack, and somewhere past the quay a boat knocked its fenders against the wall.

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Nailed beside the door was the brass compass she had bought from a pawnshop in Grimsby, its glass cracked straight across the north. I had never trusted it, but she did, so I stood there with the torch in my teeth and waited for the needle to settle. Then I licked a finger and held it up. South-west, steady, the same wind that had driven the herring boats home for forty years. I told the bucket, and the bucket did not argue.

Inside, I drew the rose on the marble slab with the handle of a wooden spoon, dusting flour over the lines until the eight points stood out. I wrote the letters in the gaps, squeezing SE and SW in where there was room. Two feathers I drew beneath it, one for each side of the wind, though I could not have said why. Mrs Pargeter looked over my shoulder and said a baker who could not read a wind could not read a proving dough either.

She gave me the grey gull quill she kept for the order book, the one that had blown through the shop window in a storm and never gone back to the sea. 'Write which way you came,' she said, 'so the next lad doesn't have to go out in the dark.' At six the first loaves came out. I wrote SW on the paper bag in pencil, pressed the quill flat, and tucked it under the rack where the fog could not reach.