Traditional colour tattoo of a compass with red roses, green leaves and a beaded chain, placed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A compass with a gold rim, a pale face and a red and blue star at its centre sits in the middle of the design. Two large red roses with dark green leaves and small orange and gold buds frame it, and a dotted chain loops around the compass. Bold black outlines and solid colour fills are set against a soft pink halo on the skin.

Traditional Thigh Compass Rose Leaf Chain Bead Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Miss Thornley,

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The compass came in on the 6.12 from Carlisle, wedged down the side of a third-class seat in carriage C, with two dried roses still knotted through its chain. Our porter Dennis handed it across the counter as if it might go off, and I suppose in a way it might. Nobody has come asking for it, so it has spent three weeks in the drawer under the timetables.

It is a handsome thing. The rim is brass worn soft where thumbs have held it, the face pale as milk, and at its heart a red and black star with a small blue stone set where the points meet. The glass is whole. The needle still wavers and settles, though for all its fuss it points only at the lamp above my desk. Inside the lid someone has scratched the words 'Keep your bearings, A.' in a careful, old-fashioned hand.

I have studied the timetables, as clerks do. The Carlisle train makes one stop before this junction, at a halt called Moorhead, where the signal lamp has been out since Easter and the station cat sleeps on the ticket hatch. Nobody there recalls a woman with beads on her wrist, but Dennis remembers a man in a grey overcoat who got off in a hurry and left a folded newspaper on the seat. Perhaps the compass was his. Perhaps it was yours. The scratches do not say which.

So I am writing in case this letter finds you. Come and claim it, or write and describe the stone, the chain, the way the needle sulks. I will keep it on the shelf, pointing at the lamp, until the next train. Yours faithfully, Arthur Pell, Lost Property, Hollin Junction.