Black and white photo of a fine line compass rose tattoo on the upper back of a person with short hair, beside a mountain and Adventure script tattoo on the inner wrist.

Compass on the back and adventure on the wrist

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a person with short hair and a light lace top. A fine line compass rose with arrows and the letters N, E, S and W sits on the upper back near the nape. On the inner wrist of a raised hand, a small mountain outline sits above the word Adventure in thin script.

Fine line Lettering Back Forearm Compass Compass rose Mountain Arrow Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Sowerby had worked nights at Hollin Cross for nineteen years, and in all that time the clock above the nurses' desk had never once agreed with the window. The lift to the third floor stuck between floors whenever it rained. The machine by the lifts only took coins minted before decimalisation. So when a boy of perhaps six was brought up from the ambulance bay with a paper map folded small in his fist, nobody at the desk thought to ask where he meant to go.

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He would not let go of the map. Mara knelt beside his trolley and asked what it showed. He said it showed the mountains, and the path up them, and the place where all the arrows pointed out of the paper. The porter said the child was muddled from the fall. Mara turned the map until its north arrow faced the glass. Outside there was only the car park lamps and a line of wet slate roofs. She laid one finger on the north point and walked it up to the inked peaks, and the boy said, that's where we'd got to before the lorry.

The fire door at the end of the corridor opened onto a stairwell nobody used after midnight. Mara climbed it with him on her hip, past the old service lift, out onto the flat roof. The cloud had cleared. The moors lay in a long dark row under the moon, each peak where the map said it would be, and the wind smelt of cut heather. The boy pointed at the highest one and told her its name, which she had never heard before and did not write down.

His mother came up from the car park at six, asking for him by his surname. He was asleep in a plastic chair with the map on his knee, folded so that the compass rose faced out. Mara wrote the handover in the book as she always did, and under the word patient, after a moment's thought, she wrote north.