Small black fine line compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the inner wrist of a raised hand, against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose with an eight-pointed star and a central circle sits on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and dark, with the cardinal letters N, E, S and W placed around the design. The image has a dark, blurred background, a raised hand at the top and a yellow sleeve at the bottom.

Fine line Forearm Compass Compass rose Star North South East West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seating plan was drawn on the back of a chart of the Dogger Bank, because Dad said the tables should sit where the sandbanks were and nobody would argue with a map. Mum said nobody argued with Dad about maps anyway, so we gave him the corner by the bar, which everyone agreed was the shallow end.

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Callum found me at half past four, when the photographer had given up on the cliff path and the low sun was catching everyone's hair the wrong way. He had his grandfather's brass compass in his jacket pocket. The glass was cracked across the N, and the needle trembled for a while before it settled, as if it were making up its mind. "Hold it flat," he said. "Wherever you stand, north stays put." I told him that was the most romantic thing a man had ever said to me while holding a piece of scrap metal, and he laughed, which is how I knew we would be all right.

At the speeches Dad stood up with his chart and announced he had finally found the way to the bar. Then Callum asked everyone to turn over their menu cards. On the back of each one he had drawn a compass rose in biro, the ink bleeding faintly through the card, with the letters pressed hard into the paper. Under the star, where the north point should have been, he had written HOME. Nobody in the room could quite decide whether that was sentimental or simply correct, and Dad, for once, didn't reach for the chart.