Black compass rose tattoo with blue, green, pink and red watercolour splashes and a script quote, on a forearm.

Compass rose with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black compass rose sits at the centre of the design, with its eight points and tick marks drawn in clean black linework. Loose watercolour-style washes in blue, green, magenta, pink and red surround the compass, fading out at the edges. A line of black script beneath the compass reads "Si hay vida hay esperanza", and the photo is taken straight on against a dark surface.

Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Watercolour Splash Script Quote Lettering

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 compass had been stuck on north since the second morning, its needle shivering against the glass as if it wanted to point somewhere else and had been told no. Inés sat on the tailgate of the pickup with the receipt Tomás had scrawled on, the route drawn in biro across the back of a feed-store slip, and tried to match the tick marks to the cracked road running out ahead of her. The tarmac had given up an hour ago. Now there was only grit, a dry wash, and a horizon the colour of spilt paint, copper bleeding into magenta where the sun was dropping.

Keep reading

Her brother had drawn the rose in the corner of the slip, eight points sharp as knives, and beneath it he had written the words he always said when she worried: si hay vida, hay esperanza. Where there is life, there is hope. She had laughed at him for it at the petrol station in Caborca, and now she read it aloud to nobody, her voice thin in the empty cab, while the jerrycan knocked against the door with less and less water in it.

She stopped trusting the needle when a line of saguaros caught the last light and every one of them leaned the same way, southwest, toward a faint blue smudge of hills. The compass had never been broken. It had simply been pointing at the north she wanted, the one with her mother's kitchen in it, and not the one the land was offering. Inés turned the brass face-down on the tailgate, folded the receipt into her shirt pocket, and started walking towards the hills, the dust settling warm around her ankles.