Black and grey compass rose tattoo with an eight-point star inside a circle and arrow points, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey compass rose sits inside a circle on the forearm, with a star of alternating solid and shaded points at its centre. Arrow-shaped pointers extend above, below and to the sides, with small letters marking the compass directions. The ink is bold with simple shading, and the photo is taken at an angle against a dark background.

Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Star Arrow Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Penrose had walked the bounds of Fenwick Hollow every autumn since her husband died, carrying his brass compass in her coat pocket, the glass cracked straight across the N. The fog came down off the Wythen Woods before the lamplighter had finished, and by the time she reached the third boundary stone the path had gone soft under her boots.

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Somewhere ahead a boy from the almshouse was calling for his dog. Ada knew his voice from the lane, thin and breaking off in the middle. She opened the compass, tilted it towards her lantern, and watched the needle swing and settle on a point that made no sense, the star of the rose turning as if it found her funny. She had walked these woods for forty years and had never once doubted the arrows.

She stopped and made herself be still. The arrows agreed with the carved stones, and the stones were older than the compass. She turned her back on the needle, faced the oak with the split crown, and counted the boundary stones aloud the way her husband had taught her, each one a step nearer the church bell. The boy's voice came again, closer to the stream than the lane.

She found him on the bank with the dog pinned under a fallen bough, both of them soaked and furious. Afterwards, at the kitchen table, she worked it out. The stream ran over a seam of iron her husband had always grumbled about, and the cracked needle had been dragged sideways by it all evening. She held the compass to the lamp and turned the rose until the solid points lined up with the shaded ones. "You'd have trusted the arrows in the end," she told it, and put it back in her pocket, glass side in.