Compass and travel tattoos on arm and shoulder
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
The collage shows three tattoos in black ink. The left panel has a fine line compass rose, a paper plane, a small world map and the word wanderlust on the forearm, with a small circular motif near the elbow. The centre panel shows a bold compass with an arrow and geometric triangular tips on the wrist, and the right panel shows a dotted compass star inside a ring with arrows across the shoulder.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Ada Lyle kept the galley of the Mary Kells clean enough to eat from the floor, and the brass compass bolted above her stove had never once lied to her. So when the herring boat came in off the Minch with the needle swung hard to the north-east, she did not laugh with the mate. She set down her ladle and waited for the captain to tap the glass, which he did, twice, the way men do when they expect a stuck thing to unstick.
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The needle did not move. Ada knew why. Her brother Iain had gone ashore at Stornoway in the spring with a ticket for the mainland and a promise to send for her, and every morning since she had wiped the glass and watched the needle lean the same way, as if it had heard his name. The captain said brass did not care about brothers. Ada said that was why she trusted it.
Forty days later she took her wages, a tin of biscuits and a paper aeroplane she had folded from a page of the ship's log. She stood on the quay at Ullapool and let the wind have it. It went north-east over the harbour wall, dipped once above the fish boxes, and climbed toward the hills where the road bent out of sight. Back in the galley the compass on the bulkhead swung slowly round to follow it, and the fire under the kettle went out.
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