Black and grey fine line compass rose tattoo with N and S points on the inner wrist, photographed with the hand open over bent knees.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits on the inner wrist, with a vertical arrow running up to an N and a feathered point below an S. The linework is thin and mostly solid black, with fine radiating lines and small tick marks forming the rose at the centre. The photograph is black and white, showing the open palm and fingers above bent knees against a plain grey pavement.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Arrow Feather Wrist

Find an artist for this

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 tin was still on the trestle table when Dennis Carrow came back from the car park with his coat half on, asking who had brought the compasses. Maureen Pask said she had. She had kept every one that Mr Hollis confiscated in the years he taught geography at Pennick Secondary, because he had never once given a boy back his compass without a sharp word about pointing things at people. When the school closed, the drawer of them went to the caretaker, and the caretaker's daughter got the tin.

Keep reading

This is how the old people told it, and so I tell it. Mr Hollis used to say a needle finds north because it has nothing better to do, but a boy finds only what he has lost, and the needle is honest enough to show him where. He said it to the class with his thumb on the brass ring, and nobody laughed, because he had lost a son in the sea off Scarborough and everyone knew it.

Dennis took out the one with the feathered arrow, the one he had been caught with in 1978, and held it flat on his palm. The needle swung, shivered, and settled towards the back door, past the coat hooks, out across the playing field where the goal posts had rusted to the colour of tea. Nobody spoke. Maureen said afterwards that the room had gone so quiet she could hear the urn ticking as it cooled.

Dennis put the compass back in the tin without a word and went out to the field in his half-buttoned coat. When he came back an hour later his cuffs were wet with grass, and the needle in his hand still pointed at the goal posts, as if it had decided he was the one who had to go and fetch something.