Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a red rose, a compass with a blue star, a rope and a tag reading Home is.

Compass, rose and luggage tag on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm bears a traditional style tattoo of a compass with a blue and navy eight-point star inside a red and cream ring, tied with rope to a hanging tag reading Home is. A red rose with white highlights and green leaves sits behind the compass, with a small anchor or nail-like shape below the tag. Bold black outlines and solid colour fills are used throughout, against a plain, dimly lit background.

Traditional Forearm Compass Rose Rope Star Leaves Anchor Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had been screwed to the galley wall of the Marigold for eleven years, and it had never once pointed anywhere but north. Jonah Pell tapped the glass with a knuckle as the ship came round the Lizard in a sour grey swell, and the needle stayed put, unbothered, while his stomach did the opposite. Cook said it was the only honest thing aboard.

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Under the tin lid of the chart box lay the tag his mother had pressed into his hand at Liverpool. She had written it in her careful copperplate on the back of a seed packet: Home is. She had not finished the sentence, and he had spent three years deciding what the rest should be. Some nights it was the kitchen table. Some nights it was the smell of wet slate after rain, or the church bell carrying across the water on a still morning.

In Valparaiso the bosun ordered the compass lashed to the rail so it could ride out a blow, and Jonah spliced the rope through its ring himself, slow and careful, the way his father had taught him to mend nets. The red rose that had stood on the chart box since Cape Horn he left where it was, because the bosun said a man should have one thing aboard that did not care about the weather.

When the Marigold limped home in the spring with half her canvas gone, the first thing he did was hang the compass on the nail beside his mother's door, tag and all. She read it, turned it over, and read the back again. You never did finish it, she said, and then laughed at herself. Put the kettle on, Jonah. I'll finish it when you've stopped moving. The needle, for once, had nothing to argue with.