Traditional colour tattoo of a compass hanging from a chain, with a compass rose face and blue waves, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and waves on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A compass with a red and yellow rim and a black and pink compass rose hangs from a grey chain at the centre of the design. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid colour fills in yellow, orange, red, blue and teal. Blue and teal waves and dark scrolling forms surround the compass and fill the edges of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had worn soft at the rim where her father's thumb used to rest, and Maud Pellow had stopped asking the crew to leave it alone. She held it up to the lamp in the wheelhouse, letting the grey chain pool in her palm, and tapped the glass until the needle shivered and settled.

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The needle was lying. Everyone aboard the Samphire said so, and by the second night off Saltmarsh Quay even Tobiah Crane had stopped arguing. Each time the wind backed west the needle swung towards the red-painted rim, and the eight-pointed rose beneath it turned its black star towards the dark shape of Orrin Head, where Maud's mother kept a lamp burning in the window of a house nobody else would rent.

The storm came at four bells, grey water climbing the bow in ropes of teal foam. Tobiah lashed himself to the wheel and shouted for the sheet. Maud hooked the chain to the binnacle ring, let the compass swing free, and read it the way her father had taught her, not north but the star. She called the turns over the wind. They slid past the Sallow reef with a yard to spare, and the sea went flat as a plate once they were in the lee of the headland.

At dawn she unhooked the compass and found the rose's black point had not moved in the night. Tobiah offered to buy it off her for a month's pay. She said no, and tucked it into her coat, where the rim pressed a warm ring into her ribs all the way up the hill to the lit window.

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