Small black compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the inner wrist, shown in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand shows a small compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist, with a circular centre, a ring of tick marks and eight pointed rays, and the letters N, E, S and W at the cardinal points. The linework is thin and even, with the design built from outlines rather than solid shading. The ink is a single dark tone, and the plain knit-textured background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Letter

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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 needle had stopped again by the stile, trembling between north and a bramble that had not been there the day before. Edith Coyle tapped the glass with her thumbnail and watched it refuse her. Behind her the last cottages of Ashcombe sat in their own chimney smoke, and ahead the beeches of Harrow Wood climbed the hill like a crowd that had decided not to let anyone through.

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Her father had sent her out with the field book, the chain and the old brass compass he had carried since he was a boy. Inside the cover he had drawn a compass rose in brown ink, eight points to its star and the letters set small at the cardinals. You do not use the rose to find yourself, he had told her, you use it to fix everything else from where you stand. She had thought that a fine thing to say until the path forked three times in a hundred yards.

She found the boundary stone at last, half sunk in leaf mould, its carved S worn almost to nothing. Someone had turned it on its side, so that its arrow pointed back the way she had come. Edith knelt, set it upright, and waited for the sun to show through the canopy. When a shadow from the nearest beech swung onto the stone's edge, she laid the compass on the moss and matched the two until they agreed, the way her father had shown her on the common, and the needle finally settled.

She walked home with the dusk coming up through the trees and the chain rattling in her coat pocket. That night she copied the rose into the field book beside the day's entry, the letters small and neat, and then went back over the S and made it a little larger than the rest, so she would know which way was home.