Forearm tattoo of a compass rose with fine black linework and blue, pink and purple watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose with a fleur-de-lis at the north point, script letters N and S, and an arrow-tipped centre sits within a faint circle. Fine black linework and dotted detail outline the compass, while soft blue, pink, purple and orange washes spread behind it and drip downwards. The design is centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Fine line Forearm Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Arrow Script letter Splash

Find an artist for this

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 brass compass had been Ada's father's, and the needle no longer trusted north, so Tomasz rapped its case twice against his palm and wrote the bearing down anyway. The Pearmain trees ran in ragged rows down the slope to the brook, their lower limbs propped on forked poles, and every apple he sighted seemed to tug the pencil a little east.

Keep reading

By four o'clock the wasps had found the windfalls and the air smelt of cider and cut grass. Ada came up the lane with a flask and a paper sack of plums, and she laughed at the way he squinted at the sun as if it were a stubborn customer. 'You're drawing the orchard the wrong shape,' she said. 'Nobody walks it straight.'

He had meant to map the boundary for the sale, the hedges and the fence line and the old well with its fleur-de-lis ironwork that the Frenchman who planted it had cast himself. Instead he unrolled the sheet across the tailgate and let the wind pin one corner with a plum. Blue ink bled where the juice touched it, then pink where she pressed her thumb to the margin.

When the light turned amber he marked true north with a small iron arrow on the page and handed her the pencil. She drew the second line herself, looping through the rows as if she were tracing a river, and it came out crooked and lovely. The compass sat in his lap pointing at nothing in particular, and he decided that was the right way to leave it.