Black ink compass rose tattoo with a splattered blackwork backdrop and a small fleur-de-lis on the inner forearm.

Compass rose on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of the forearm, with a letter S on the outer ring and a ring of small diamond marks around the edge. Solid black ink fills the star points and central dial, while loose, splattered ink shapes spread across the wrist and elbow sides. The palette is black only, and the design is framed by the arm and a tiled floor in the background.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Splatter Fleur-de-lis

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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

The compass hung on a nail above the cooper's door in Hollin Wood, and nobody in the village had ever seen it point north. It pointed at the edge of the trees, always, and the old women said that was where the lost things were kept. When Tamsin's brother walked into the wood after the spring floods and did not come out, her mother took the brass compass down and gave it to her without a word.

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Tamsin went in at dusk with a loaf, a knife and the compass held flat in her palm. The needle swung and settled on a star-shaped point, sharp as a thorn, and she followed it through ferns to where the ground dropped into a hollow. There the ink-black stain of a spilt pot had soaked into the moss in the shape of a hand, and at its centre sat a stone with the letter S cut into it, worn almost smooth.

She knelt and set the compass on the stone. The needle spun, then stopped pointing at her own boots. Her brother was sitting under the roots of the oak behind her, his sleeves rolled, drawing a ring of small diamonds in the dirt with a stick, pleased with himself. He looked up and said the compass had always been wrong about the south, and that she had been too clever to trust it.

Tamsin laughed until she cried, then carried him home by the ring of diamonds she had scratched on the path, so the wood would know which way they had come.