Fine line compass rose with map shapes and a bare tree tattoo on a palm and wrist, in black and grey ink.

Compass rose and tree on a palm

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with an eight-point star, small sparkle stars and faint map shapes sits at the centre of an open palm, with tiny coordinate text beside it. A bare tree with branching lines extends down onto the wrist, and a short word is inked along the side of a finger. The ink is mostly black and grey with a slightly purplish tone, and the design is shown in sharp focus against a pale grey pavement background.

Fine line Botanical Hand Compass Compass rose Map Star Tree Coordinates Script Continent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table of the Ellen Mary smells of wet wool and diesel, and you have been pencilling the same small cross for three nights running. Skipper Dunnet says the boat is sound and the fleet will be back in Peterhead by Thursday. He says nothing about the figures you keep checking against the brass compass rose bolted to the bulkhead, the eight points of it sharp under the red lamp. Forty-seven north, a hundred and six east. Nobody aboard has ever sailed within a thousand miles of that number, and the old chart your grandmother kept in a tin says it is dry land.

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When the watch changes, you tell Dunnet the wind has backed and the glass is falling, which is true, and that the Norwegian grounds are fished out, which is less true. He laughs at you the way he laughs at the gulls. Half the fleet is already turning west, their lights strung out across the black like a necklace somebody has dropped. You lay your finger on the rose and walk it outward along the thin lines, past the stars the chartmaker dotted in for decoration, past the scrap of coast with no name, until your fingertip rests on the blank space where the old map simply stops.

At four bells the sea goes green at the bow. Sea-fire, the deckhands call it, a cold light running off the bow wave as if the water has remembered something. You stand at the wheel with the chart rolled under your arm and feel the boat lean toward the east. You do not correct it. You ask the deckhand to fetch the lamp, and you watch the light crawl along the rail and go out, and you write the time in the log in your own handwriting, which is steadier than you expected.