Compass, birds and waves design

Black and grey · Flash

A pocket compass sits at an angle with its needle pointing up and compass points marked around the dial. Waves break from the lower left and birds fly up from the top right. The linework is pen and ink with fine hatching and stippled shading on the compass face, waves and rim, with no colour.

Compass Wave Bird Sea Pocket watch Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Porthmerren believed the needle was broken, though it had swung wild since the squall off the Skerrey. Mabel held the brass case flat on her palm while the boat rolled, and watched the north point wander towards the wrong side of the glass, the letters on the dial blurring under her thumb.

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Then the gulls came up out of the murk over the stern, a loose flock of them wheeling and breaking apart like thrown ash, and she followed them with her eyes because there was nothing else to follow. Tom used to say that birds would not fly out to a rock with no fish on it, and that a man who learned to read the sky had no need of a needle. He had bought the compass from a Falmouth chandler the year their boy was born, and said it was for the sea, not for sulking over.

She put the tiller over. The wind dropped, the fog thinned to a grey ribbon, and beneath it the water broke white against the black shelf of the Skerrey. Her nephew Aled, who had sulked all morning about being sent out, stared at the dial and then at her face.

"It's pointing at the birds," he said.

Mabel snapped the lid shut and slid the compass into her coat. "Never mind the needle," she said, and steered for the gulls.