Black and grey compass rose tattoo with feathers, clouds and script lettering across the forearm, in a fine line and shaded style.

Compass rose with feathers and clouds on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large compass rose sits at the centre of the design, with its cardinal and intercardinal points labelled in a hand-drawn serif font. Feathers, scattered dots and soft shaded clouds surround it, and a block of cursive script runs along the right side of the arm. The linework is dark and mostly even, with grey shading on the clouds and background, and the image is composed as a close side view of the arm.

Lettering Forearm Compass Feather Cloud Script Quote

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

Hold the tiller steady, lad, she wants to drift east the way the water does, and that's no good when the lock keeper's expecting us from the west. Pass me that brass compass off the hook. Not that one, the one with the cracked glass. My father bought it from a Hull pawnbroker the year the Ouse came over the banks, and he swore it had never once been wrong, which is a thing only a liar or a man with no wife would swear.

Keep reading

The trouble that winter was the fog. It sat on the river like wet wool and took the banks clean away. We had a load of Yorkshire flags and a lad called Tom Pennock who'd signed on to get away from his mother's kitchen. He kept losing north. Every time he looked up the sky had gone the colour of pewter and the needle swung like a drunk on a Saturday. I told him what my father told me: the compass doesn't lie, it only points where the iron wants it, and you have to know what your own bones are doing.

So we went by feathers. Gulls on the far bank always face the wind, you see, and a grey feather dropped on the deck will turn to face the same way. Tom laughed until he saw me pinch one from the hatch cover and let it fall. It spun, settled, and pointed straight at the sheep sheds we'd been hunting for an hour. The clouds were lifting off the water by then, long and soft like bales on a market cart.

We tied up at the sheds before dark. Tom kept that feather in his pocket after. He wrote on the back of it the words he'd been too shy to say to his mother, posted it to Hull the next morning, and I never asked what it said. Some directions a body keeps for itself.