Compass rose tattoo on a forearm with blue watercolour washes and dotwork shading in black and grey.

Compass rose on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded compass rose with cardinal letters sits at the centre of the forearm, with a black and grey compass face and needle points. Blue watercolour-style washes and halftone dots spread around the design, fading out toward the edges of the skin. The composition runs the length of the forearm, with the compass as the main focal point and the blue wash framing it.

Dotwork Forearm Compass Compass rose Watercolour splash Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit close, the lamp's near out and I'll not tell it twice. Hollin Pit, the winter the north level flooded, and a surveyor called Amos Tully came down the shaft with a brass compass in a box lined with green baize. The men laughed at him. They had their own road by the feel of the walls, and a man who needs a needle to find his way, they said, has no business underground.

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The water came through the roof at the bottom of the level like spilt ink, blue-grey where the lamps caught it, and the dust hanging in the air settled on it in little dots, thick as flour on a baker's board. Tully set his compass on a flat stone and waited for the needle to stop shaking. Eight points, he said, and each one a way home. Then he scratched the letters into the rock with a nail, N and E and S and W, while the men watched and smoked and said nothing.

The needle swung north-west, steady as a church bell, toward the drift the company had sealed with brick ten years before. Nobody had said why. Tully laid his palm on the brick and felt the cold come through it, and he knew the men had been walking round that seam all winter, trusting the wall and not the true bearing. He drew one clean chalk arrow on the brick and went up for a hammer.

They broke through the next morning. The water had drained off, the air was sweet, and the coal ran black and bright for a mile before it met the old workings. Tully's arrow is still on that brick, gone grey now, and the boys who go down the north level touch it as they pass, the way you'd touch a doorframe for luck.