Traditional style colour tattoo of a compass rose inside a scalloped medallion, framed by two red flowers and green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A compass rose with a black eight-point star sits at the centre of a grey and red circular medallion with a dotted border. Two red and blue flowers, green leaves and a yellow scalloped edge surround the central design, all outlined in bold black linework. Bright colour fills the design against a plain pale background.

Traditional Forearm Compass Compass rose Flower Leaves Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the floor of the Corran Pier Ballroom before you learn the names of the bands. Set in brass at dead centre of the sprung maple is a compass rose with eight points, and behind it a red disc the size of a dinner plate. On your first Saturday Mrs Ada Quirk, who has run the cloakroom since the war, takes you by the elbow and tells you nobody dances on the red. You go round it. Everyone goes round it, she says, and the ones who don't are the ones who end up lost.

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The cloakroom hatch looks out across the whole floor, so you see everything from there. Tickets, damp overcoats, a pair of left-footed brogues nobody has claimed since 1961. The regulars keep their own points. Mr Ferris always turns north-east at the bandstand because his wife stood there once, and Eddie Lusk, the drummer, claims the south-west corner where the bass hits hardest. You are not supposed to have a point yet, but you find one anyway, at the window nearest the lamp.

In October the band cancels, and Eddie asks you to dance anyway. You fetch a record of something slow and cross the floor with him. He leads you onto the red, and you feel him hesitate, then he laughs and steps around it, carrying you in a wide, clumsy arc through the north, the east and the south. At the last point he stops and says the rose was never for dancing on. It was put there so that you could find your way back to the room if you ever drifted.

When the hall empties you turn the lamps down one at a time. The brass catches the last light over the red, and you stand at its centre for a moment with your heels together, facing the sea door, the only direction you have ever been sure of.