Traditional style tattoo of a compass rose, red rose and pink and orange flowers with green leaves on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass, rose and flowers on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold compass rose with black and yellow points and a grey dotted face sits inside an orange ring. A red rose with black outlines and a pink and orange flower cluster with green leaves frame it on the arm. The solid colour fills and heavy black outlines are typical of traditional tattooing, set against plain white paper.

Traditional Forearm Compass Compass rose Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bakery on Chapel Row lit its ovens at four, and by the time the bell on the Quay struck five I had flour to the elbows and a compass rose on my arm that my mother said would never wash off. Old Tomasz swore by the thing. He had been a deckhand on the Mary Lowe before his knees gave out, and he claimed a true bearing was the only thing a man could trust before the sun was up. So each morning I checked the bread against the wall clock, the way he taught me, and told him which way the wind was coming off the water.

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The morning Ada Penhallow came in asking for a loaf that wasn't on the slate, she had a brass compass in her coat pocket and a face like a closed shutter. She said her brother had sailed out of Falmouth in March and not come back, and the post office had stopped answering her letters. I didn't have a loaf for her. I had yesterday's rye and a quarter of a seed cake. She took the cake and wrapped it in her handkerchief and then asked me, very quietly, which way the wind had been blowing at dawn.

I didn't know. Tomasz did. He pulled himself up off his stool, squinted at the flour sacks, and said the wind had come from the south-west all week, the way it always did before a ship got lost in the Channel. Ada nodded as though she had expected nothing else. She opened her compass, turned it slowly on her palm until the needle settled, and walked out into the grey light without another word.

She came back a fortnight later with a postcard from Lisbon in her fist. Tomasz had the kettle on. I never found out what it said, but Ada left the postcard on the counter, and I pinned it up beside the wall clock where the bearings are chalked, because some things are worth knowing the direction of.