Black compass rose tattoo with arrow points and a dotted ring on the inner forearm, shown in a photo of a person in jeans.

Compass rose with arrows on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits within a dotted circle, with an arrow running through the design from the upper right to the lower left. The lines are fine and dark grey-black, with a dotted border and small triangular markers around the ring. The tattoo is shown on the forearm against a neutral background, with the design fairly centred in the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Arrow Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the compass has been lying to me since Tuesday, and I have decided to believe the mule instead. The needle drifts a full point east whenever we climb above the tarn. Mr Aske says it is the iron in the scree and not the instrument, though he has never once been wrong about iron and I have never once been right about anything that required trusting my own hands. So we walk by the sun and by the dotted line I drew on the map, the one with little triangles for cairns.

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At the top of Scarrow Gap the wind took my hat and I watched it go over the lip like a bird that had given up. Below, the valley lay folded in shadow and the river was a thread of pewter. Aske unrolled the chart on a flat stone and weighted its corners with four pebbles and his pipe. He traced the arrow I had inked across the rose, the line I meant as the road to the mill, and said the arrow was pointing somewhere the road never went.

I told him the arrow points where the wind points, and that a thing drawn so carefully ought to be trusted. He laughed at me, kindly, and then he stopped laughing and looked a long time at the north point. The needle had settled. It was true again, pointing back the way we had come, as if it had only been waiting for us to turn round.

We turned. I am writing this by the stove at the hut, with the chart pinned above me and a fresh cross inked beside the iron seam so that whoever comes after will know to walk round it. Keep my hat, if it ever comes down the valley. Your loving sister, Ada.