Black fine line tattoo of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis north marker and the words not all those who wander are lost, on the inner forearm.

Compass rose and quote on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits on the inner forearm with a fleur-de-lis at the north point and a dotted line running up from it. Beside the compass, the words not all those who wander are LOST are written in mixed handwritten and printed lettering. The linework is thin and even, and the image is a close, straight-on photograph of the wrist with a coloured bangle and beaded bracelet above the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Quote Lettering Dotted line Wrist

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie Kinnaird had kept the chart table on the Skerrin ferry for thirty years, and still her hand tightened on the dividers when the fog came down over the Sound. Tonight it lay on the water like wet wool. The deckhand, young Callum Fyfe, stood at the rail with a torch he kept switching on and off out of nerves.

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"We're off the line," he said. "The buoy should be to starboard."

She didn't look up. She tapped the north point of the chart with the brass dividers, where her father had inked a small fleur-de-lis in the margin decades before, a joke about the French surveyor who had once sounded the bay and got it wrong. "Then we're not lost. We're just somewhere the buoy hasn't told us about yet."

He laughed, but she saw his shoulders loosen. She drew the old way for him, a pencil line running out from the harbour mouth. Dots for the turns of the tide, dashes for the wind that had pushed them east. Every course they had steered since leaving Skerrin pier went down on the paper, so that the line became a true record of where they had been, and that was what the sea could be trusted to respect.

The lighthouse horn came through the murk, two long notes, exactly where the chart said it would be. Callum let out a breath that fogged in front of him. Marjorie capped her pencil, tucked the chart under the strap, and ran one finger along the dotted line back to the pier, neat as a stitch.