Black compass rose with a faint grey dial and blue and purple watercolour splashes, tattooed on a forearm.

Compass rose with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black compass rose with a faint grey outer dial and partly visible compass letters sits at the centre of the design. Soft blue and purple watercolour washes spread out behind the compass and fade at their edges. The tattoo is photographed on a forearm against a black leather surface, with the compass near the centre of the frame.

Forearm Compass Compass rose Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has buried the lower step of the Kettlebridge Inn, so you are the one with the shovel when the stranger's lantern bobs up the lane at dusk. Mrs Ruddock says she will not have a door opened to anyone walking in a blizzard. You have already lifted the latch, and the cold comes in across the flagstones like a dog that knows its way.

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He is called Osric Vane, and he carries a map case soaked dark at the corners. He unrolls the chart across the taproom table and weights it with pewter mugs. The sea on it is washed in blues that have bled past the coastlines, and in one corner a compass rose sits with its eight points inked black, its outer dial faint as breath on glass. He taps the north point with a cold finger. The lodestone that set it, he says, was lost in a wreck off the Scarrow reef, and every rose drawn since has been pointing at a ghost.

You fetch the good pen from behind the bar and ask him where north ought to be. He laughs, then stops laughing when you start to draw. You work by the fire while the wind hammers the shutters, marking the reef, the bay and the old tide mill. Mrs Ruddock drifts past twice, pretending not to watch. By the time the ink is dry, the violet wash in the margin has spread a fingernail further than before, as if the paper remembers the rain.

He leaves before dawn with the chart rolled tight under his coat. In the morning the snow is smooth except for a line of boot prints heading west, and on the taproom table lies the old map with a second rose drawn beside the first, its north point turned toward the inn's own door. You fold it into your apron pocket and go out to clear the step again, because frost has started to feather the window with blue, and the day has already chosen its direction.