Black and grey compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters and a dotted outer ring, shown on the inner arm in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on inner arm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with a star-shaped centre, pointed rays and a dotted outer circle, with the letters N, E, S and W marking the directions. The linework is bold and the shading is solid black with light grey areas across the star points. The image is a black and white photograph, with the tattoo centred against pale skin and a light fabric edge at the bottom.

Traditional Forearm Compass Compass rose North East South West Star Dotted circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Thornbury Edge went into Harrow Wood without a compass, and Ada Pell had the best one in the village, a flat brass disc her grandfather had cut with eight points and the four letters round its rim. When the miller's youngest went in after the strayed goats at dusk, Ada went after him with the disc open on her palm and the needle trembling under the glass.

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The wood did not want to be crossed. The path bent back on itself, the oaks shifted their roots when she wasn't looking, and twice she heard a tinker's bell somewhere to the left, though no tinker had come near the village in forty years. Tom sat down on a root and cried that they would never find the way. Ada opened the disc again. The point of the needle sat steady on the star, and it pointed past the trees the way the sun had gone down, not the way the goats had run.

She made him walk that way with his back to the last of the light, counting his steps aloud so the wood could hear how many there were. They came out at a clearing with a stone well and four strayed goats chewing at the moss, and the bell, when they reached it, was only a cracked cup hanging from a hawthorn.

On the way home Tom asked why the compass always pointed north when everything else in the wood turned about. Ada tapped the glass. "It doesn't point north to be clever," she said. "It points north because somebody decided where home was, and kept deciding it, every day." At the edge of the trees she cut a small S into the bark of the last oak, so the wood would know which way they had come.