Traditional style tattoo of a compass surrounded by red roses, green leaves and chain on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A compass with a star-shaped needle sits at the centre of the design, framed by a chain looping over its top and down its left side. Three red roses with dark green leaves and a small bud fill the space around it, with bold black outlines and solid fills. The colours are red, green, tan and grey shading on the compass, set against the skin of the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Compass Chain Rose Rose bud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass had belonged to my father, and by the third hour out of Sallow Wells its needle had stopped trusting anything. We had the windows down because the air conditioning in his old Corolla gave up somewhere past the salt flats, and the heat came in like a dog that had been waiting at the door. Mae sat with her boots on the dashboard, turning the brass case over and over in her lap, the chain pooled in the footwell like something she had forgotten to put back.

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'It's lying,' she said. 'Needles always lie when you've stopped asking them the right question.' I told her a compass only knows north, and north is poor company for anyone heading somewhere specific. She laughed at that, the way she laughed at most things I said, and pointed out the window at a row of dead roses growing in a coffee can outside a shuttered diner, the petals gone the colour of old brick. 'Those were red once,' she said. 'Somebody watered them every morning and then got tired.'

The road dipped into a washout and the back wheels slid. We sat in the ditch with the engine ticking, the compass open on her knee, the star-shaped needle spinning slow and then settling on nothing at all. She traced the eight points with her thumbnail until the glass smeared. Then she clicked the lid shut and held it out to me.

'East,' she said. 'Just follow the sun. It never once pretended to be anywhere else.' We walked the shoulder for an hour, the chain swinging from my fist, until the shadow of the car lay long and crooked across the sand, pointing the way we had come, and neither of us turned around to check.