Black and red compass rose tattoo with N, S, E and W markings on the inner forearm of a person wearing a denim shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose sits centred on the forearm, with a long vertical line running from north to south and a horizontal line from east to west, each marked with a letter. The central star is filled in solid black with red points, set within a ring of fine dotted and hatched linework. The ink is mostly black with a single red accent, and the photo is taken straight on against a plain pale wall.

Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Star North South East West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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I nearly didn't come to the reunion, and I've been turning over why. It isn't the hall, or the lukewarm sausage rolls the committee always promises. It's that you'll ask what I did with the compass. You gave it to me outside the chemistry block in 1998, the brass one with the cracked glass, and told me the red point was north because your grandad said so, and everyone else's was just a point of view.

I still have it. It sits in the glovebox of the van, under the parking tickets, and it has never once pointed where I was going. I used to think that was the joke. Last month I drove to Scarborough in a fog so thick the hedges vanished, and I pulled over on the cliff road and got it out, and the needle swung round and settled on the red point as if it had been waiting for me to ask.

So I'm writing this instead of texting, because you always did hate a rushed message. Come on Saturday. Bring the chart your grandad drew, the one with the crossed lines I could never read. I'll bring the compass. We can work out together which of us was pointing the wrong way.

Love, Dani