Black and grey dotwork compass rose with an arrow, feather and ribbon tattooed on the inner forearm.

Compass, arrow and feather on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits on the forearm with an arrow running through its centre, its tip pointing up toward the wrist, and a feather and ribbon hanging from the shaft. Fine linework and dotted shading define the compass points and the feather, while small lettering curves around the compass ring. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a dark background, with the hand visible at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Forearm Compass Compass rose Arrow Feather Ribbon Lettering Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My mother kept the fletching bench by the window at the edge of Harrow Wood, where the last cottage leaned against the trees. I was eleven when she first let me bind a feather, a grey goose primary she had soaked in linseed so it wouldn't split. Mine came out lopsided. She unwound it without a word and started again.

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The compass came from my grandfather, a brass thing with a cracked glass that he swore pointed at whatever you were running from. Nobody in the village believed him. The needle wandered, and the lettering round its rim had worn so smooth you could only guess at the words. I used to trace them with my thumb while the arrows dried on the sill.

The summer the carter stopped coming, the well went low and the bell in the church tower rang for a child lost in the trees. Men went in with lanterns and came out at dusk with nothing. I took my longbow and the arrow I'd fletched that spring, the one with the red ribbon knotted near the nock, and walked in until the path forgot itself. The compass swung round and settled, stubborn, on a gap between two oaks.

Where the arrow fell, the child sat in a bed of ferns with the ribbon's other end in her fist, humming. I didn't follow the arrow back. I followed the ribbon, and the needle, and the smell of woodsmoke that meant home. My mother, bent over the bench, didn't look up. She only turned the feather so its good side faced the window and said, "Again, then."