Black and grey compass rose tattoo with a feathered arrow and a quote in script lettering on the inner forearm, with a world map outline above the wrist.

Compass rose and world map on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with solid black points and a checkered ring sits centre frame on the inner forearm, with compass directions written in script around the edge. Below it an arrow runs down the forearm, and two lines of script read "Not all those who wander are lost", while a fine-lined world map sits above the wrist. The tattoo is entirely black ink with grey shading in the ring, set against warm skin and beige tiles.

Lettering Forearm Compass Compass rose World map Arrow Feather Quote Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the range, and mind the cat, she's had a hard winter herself. Your great-uncle Tom kept a brass compass in his waistcoat pocket that never once pointed north on the Harrow Fell farm. It pointed at whatever trouble was coming, and it was usually right, which is why nobody ever asked him to mend it.

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The January the drove road filled to the hedgetops, a ewe strayed across the beck, and Tom set off after her at four o'clock with a lantern and the old kitchen map folded in his coat. My grandmother had pasted that map to the wall herself, the whole world drawn in fine ink, every coastline leaning towards Africa. She told him to be back before the lamp oil ran out. He said the ewe wasn't going anywhere, which was the only joke he made all that week.

By six the lantern was a yellow smear and the compass was spinning like a top in his palm. He stopped at a snowed-up stile and did the thing my grandmother never forgave him for. He shut his eyes, opened the map in his head, and walked the way the coastlines seemed to lean. Half an hour later he heard the ewe's bell from the wrong side of the beck, and the wrong side turned out to be the right one.

He came home with the animal under one arm and his hat full of snow. When my grandmother asked how he'd found his way, he tapped the compass and said not all those who wander are lost, love, some of us just get turned round. She threw the kettle at him. He kept the compass all the same, and it still points at trouble, and we still ask him which way home.