Colour tattoo on a forearm of a pocket compass surrounded by magnolia flowers and green leaves, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Compass and magnolia flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pocket compass with a gold case and red and green dial sits among magnolia blooms, buds and leaves that climb up the forearm. The linework is dark and clean, with soft grey and green shading on the leaves and petals. Muted greens, pinks, tan and gold ink dominate, and the design is arranged in a vertical composition that runs from the wrist to just below the elbow.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Compass Pocket watch Magnolia Flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lost property office at Leeds station shut at six, but Dora Wrigley still had the key on her lanyard. At ten past nine on a wet Thursday she stood under the strip light with a brass compass in her palm, trying to decide whether a thing with no owner could still be lost.

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The claim slip had been tied to its chain with garden string. Found, platform four, the note said in pencil, lid shut, needle still moving. The case was warm from the radiator behind her. When she thumbed the lid open, the dial was ringed in red, the star of points around the needle faintly green at the tips, and tucked under the glass was a magnolia petal, pale and dry as tissue. Someone had put it there on purpose.

She meant to bin the compass by ten, but the needle would not settle. It kept swinging back toward the window, toward Wellington Street and the ragged tree in the square opposite, its buds dark as fists against the sodium glow. Dora took her coat. Outside, the rain had thinned to a mist that beaded on her sleeves. She followed the needle past the taxi rank, over the canal bridge and up a steep street of shuttered shops, until the hand went still beneath a lamp at a black iron gate.

Behind the gate a magnolia had come into flower early, a dozen blooms the size of teacups, spilling petals onto a path already white with them. An old woman in a quilted dressing gown stood on the step with a torch. 'You've brought it back,' she said, not as a question, and held out her hand. Dora laid the compass in it. The woman opened the lid, looked at the petal for a long moment, and smiled. Then she closed the lid, and the needle swung once and settled, pointing at the petals on the path between them.