Small black compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist, shown on an open palm resting on a nautical chart.

Compass rose tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose with N, E, S and W markings and a fine black outline sits on the inner wrist, below the palm. The linework is crisp and the design is entirely black ink with no shading. A white rope bracelet with a gold anchor clasp is worn on the same wrist, and a blue and green nautical chart fills the background.

Fine line Forearm Compass Compass rose Anchor Map Hand Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was pinned to the back of the chandlery door when I first saw it, and the man who sold it to me, Ansel Dreyer, swore the soundings were right to the fathom even though the coastline had been drawn by somebody who had never once been seawards of Harwich. I bought it for three shillings and a jar of pickled onions. My sister said I had been cheated. I said that was the only honest way to buy a map.

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That winter I learned the points of the compass the way other boys learn hymns, by repeating them until my mouth did it without me. North, east, south, west. Then the half-winds, then the quarter-winds, until the rose on the chart looked less like a drawing and more like a clock that counted something else. Ansel used to tap the centre of it with a pencil stub and say, you can always find yourself on a rose, lad, it only asks you where you were pointing when you lost your nerve.

I took the rose to the back room above the fishmonger on Quay Street, where a woman called Maude Okonedo worked the needle with a magnifying glass on a brass arm and a radio turned low. She asked me where I wanted it. I held out my left hand, palm up, and she laughed and said a man who wanted to know his way should keep it on the inside of his wrist, where he could look at it when he was lost and nobody else would see him doing it. It took her forty minutes. It stung less than the rope I had been wearing for a week.

The chart is still on my wall. Ansel is dead now, and the rope bracelet has gone soft and grey. When I can't decide which road to take, I turn my hand over and check which way the arrow is pointing, and then I take the other road.