Fine line black tattoo of crossed arrows with N, E, S and W compass letters on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass arrows tattoo on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Seen from behind, a person's neck and upper back show a small tattoo of two crossed arrows, with arrowheads pointing up and feathered ends below, and the letters N, E, S and W at the four points. The linework is thin and black with no shading, set against a pale wall and a wall clock while the hair is held up. The composition is centred on the tattoo, with the rest of the frame softly out of focus.

Fine line Neck Compass Arrow Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late to Harrowby that year, and the well froze solid under the ash tree. Old Maren Tullis sent her two grandsons out with a pair of arrows and a sack of salt, telling them to shoot north until the frost gave up its grip. The elder boy, Piers, had never once hit a mark he aimed at, but he took the bow without complaint and walked out past the sheep pens with his brother trailing behind him.

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They walked until the farm was a grey smudge behind them, and the snow had no tracks but their own. Each time Piers drew, the wind swung the arrow wide, so he learned to read the sky instead, the way his grandmother had taught him: the low clouds that pushed from the north, the shadow of the ridge that lay always to the east. When he loosed at last, the arrow sank into the drift at the foot of the hill, and the snow beneath it began to hiss and steam.

He shot south, then east, then west, and each arrow gave back warmth where it fell. By dusk the ground under the ash tree was soft again, and the well gave a single gurgling cough. Maren met them at the gate with a lantern and looked at the snow on Piers's collar without asking how he had kept his bearings.

He never told her he had only ever known which way was home by watching her hands. She had pointed every road for him from the kitchen table, sketching the four quarters in flour with one crooked finger, and he had simply copied the shape into his skin when he was grown and far from Harrowby.