Compass rose and hanging feathers design

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a compass rose with an arrow pointing up and a cluster of feathers hanging from the base. Leaves and vines wrap around the outer ring, which carries a small script word. Fine hatching and stippled shading add depth to the compass and feathers against a plain white background.

Compass Compass rose Arrow Feather Leaves Vine Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By October the big top has more patches than canvas, and the wind through its seams whistles like a kettle nobody remembers to lift. You sit on the wagon step under the compass Mr Okonedo painted on the rear door years ago, sewing a barn owl quill back onto an arrow your father fletched before the show had a name. The good feathers are nearly gone. Nobody in the ring can tell the difference now except you.

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Bartholomew Fenn comes across the field with the ledger tucked under his arm and a telegram from a council in Lincolnshire that refuses them the common. "They want a bouncy castle," he says, as if the word itself were the trouble. You tell him the arrow still flies true if the wind is read properly. He asks you to stop talking about the wind. So you take the bow out past the empty stake holes where the animal pens stood, and you do not aim at the paper target the children used to hit. You aim at the sky, because the compass on the wagon has pointed the same way for as long as anyone remembers, and the show never once went anywhere it did not choose.

You loose the arrow north. It climbs past the last standing pole, bends at the top where the crosswind catches the feathers, and drops two fields away into a hawthorn hedge. A girl from the village finds it an hour later and runs home with it held up like a flag. Fenn watches the arc from the gate, takes off his hat, and sets the ledger down on the step beside you without opening it.