Colour tattoo of a compass rose surrounded by orange, red and purple leaves and dots on a forearm, shown in three side-by-side panels.

Compass rose with autumn leaves on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A compass rose sits inside a gold and green ringed compass face, with a blue and red eight-point star at its centre. Orange, red and purple leaves and small dot clusters circle the compass on the forearm. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills are used across three side-by-side panels of the same arm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Compass Compass rose Leaves Dot Star

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 brass compass has pointed the wrong way since Tewkesbury, but you keep tapping its glass at every lock anyway, the way your father used to. October has come early to the Avon. Leaves pile against the bow of the narrowboat Clementine as if someone has been dealing a hand of cards and dropping the losers into the water. Red ones, orange ones, a few purple ones gone the colour of bruised plums.

Keep reading

At Evesham lock, Dilys Crane leans on her gate paddle and tells you the river has turned. Not the water, she says, the leaves. Watch which way they travel. The water goes one way, but the leaves go where the wind wants, and this wind has been out of the south-west since Sunday. You laugh, because you have a proper chart with the soundings pencilled in. Dilys only shrugs and tells you to mind the sill.

That night you spread the chart across the cabin table and weight its corners with a tin of tea, a spanner and your mother's thimble. You set the compass on top. Its blue points argue with the red ones. Outside, a leaf knocks the window, then another. You sit there until the lamp smokes, following the drifts in your head: south-west, then east where the reeds bend over, then north through the sluice gates.

At first light the barge noses out from the moorings with the tiller hard over. The leaves are already racing ahead on the current, a scatter of orange and purple flags, and you steer after them, not the needle, which has never once been right about anything. By noon the water is the colour of tea and the cabin smells of wet oak, and you are not lost at all.