Black and grey compass rose tattoo with a dotted outer ring and N, E, S and W points, shown on a forearm in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with a central star of eight points, labelled N, E, S and W, sits inside a dotted outer circle and a set of thin concentric rings. The linework is bold and solid black, with fine dotted detail around the edge and light grey shading in the inner rings. The tattoo is centred in the frame on the inside of a forearm, and the black and white photo has a soft, grainy finish.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bramley rows at Hollins Farm ran so straight in August that you could stand at the gate and still lose yourself in them. By the last week of the month the wasps had found the windfalls and the air smelled of cider vinegar and cut grass. My grandfather's brass compass was in my jacket pocket, its lid worn smooth where his thumb used to rest, and I was supposed to be counting trees, not reading it.

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Dad had sent me out with the ladder and a tally sheet, but the sheet had blown into the ditch twice. So I took the compass out and stood between the eighth and ninth rows, turning slowly until the needle trembled and settled on the N. The old orchard map in the tractor shed had a rose drawn in the corner, eight points, dotted rings, letters picked out in red ink. Gran said a surveyor had drawn it who owed her husband money and paid the debt in ink.

The needle pointed the wrong way for the boundary, so I followed the rose instead. It led me to a gap in the hedge and, behind it, a row of trees nobody had recorded since before Dad was born, heavy with small green apples, their trunks split and mossed over. I bit one and it was sour enough to make my eyes water. Nobody had sprayed them or picked them, and the grass beneath was flattened in a long oval where something large had slept.

When I got back, Dad was on the step with the tally sheet in his hand, already annoyed. I told him we had one more row than he thought. He looked at the compass in my palm, then at the drawing I had sketched on the back of the sheet, and laughed the way he did when he had lost an argument. He wrote the new row in pencil, rubbed it out, and wrote it again in ink.