Fine line compass rose tattoo with moon phases around the rim, shaded in black and red-brown, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with moon phases on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose with a central star and eight points, labelled with N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW around a shaded ring. Moon phases sit around the outer edge, drawn in fine black outlines with red-brown shading. The design is centred on a pale forearm against a white, speckled top and blue denim.

Fine line Forearm Compass Compass rose Moon phase Moon Cardinal points Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last night we pitched on the Hartlepool road, Dad made the whole company stand in the mud and look up, because the moon was on its third quarter and he said a show that lost the moon had lost its way. Nobody laughed. Painted on the centre pole of the big top was a compass rose, eight red-brown points around a shaded ring, and the lads had been running their boots round the sawdust for ten years without once asking which way was north.

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Mrs Okonedo from the bank in Wakefield had the papers ready. The elephant had gone to a sanctuary in Kent in March, the calliope was sold for scrap in April, and by August we were three acts and a clown who had stopped doing the clown. She wanted the poles and the wagons. I said the ticket wagon was not for sale, and it was the only thing I had said all summer that nobody argued with.

So on the final night I took my penknife to the rim of that wagon and scraped the moon phases off, one by one, the way Dad had taught me when I was small enough to hold the torch. New moon went first, then the waxing gibbous, the full, and last the waning crescent that always looked to me like a thumbnail. The compass I left alone. N, NE, E, all the way round to NW, and his initials cut small beneath the E where only a child would think to look.

In the morning the wagon went north on a lorry with the rest of our lives. I stood at the layby with a brass ring from the old pole in my pocket, turning it until the needle of my thumb swung toward Scotland, then toward home, then nowhere at all. The sky was pale and the moon was nowhere to be seen, which Dad would have called a bad sign, and which I have decided to call the start of something.