Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a forearm of a compass, red roses and a banner reading wherever you go, with a small oval plaque at the top.

Compass, roses and banner on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo combines a gold-rimmed compass, a small oval plaque reading ADAM, and a grey banner with the words wherever you go and will go. Red roses and red flower buds sit around the compass, with dark green leaves and fine grey shading giving the piece depth. Bold outlines and rich, saturated red and gold tones fill the composition, which is centred on the forearm.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Compass Rose Banner Script Pocket watch Leaves Flower

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 rain has found the gap in the canvas again, and it drips onto the tray of compasses you have been polishing since seven. Your father always said a compass sells itself if you let it point at the customer. Today nobody has stopped except a man in a waxed jacket who asked whether the needles were true north or only pretending. You told him the needles were honest and the market was not, and he bought a whistle instead.

Keep reading

Later a woman ducks under the awning, shaking out an umbrella that has given up. She wants a pocket watch, and she turns over a silver lid to find the engraving worn to a few scratches, an A and a rough M. 'Adam,' she says, as if testing the name for weight. You tell her the watch kept good time for a hundred years and has earned the right to forget a few letters. She laughs, and it is the first warm sound of the morning.

She does not buy the watch. She buys a brass compass with a red stone at its heart, and asks you to wrap it in tissue rather than paper, because paper goes soft in the wet. While you fold the corners she tells you what she means to have inked along her arm: wherever you go, I will go, with roses above it and the compass at its centre so she always knows the way back. She counts out her coins twice, though you have not asked her to.

When she has gone, you wipe the watch lid with your thumb, and the scratched letters catch the grey light. The rain is still coming through the canvas, but the compass in the tray has settled, its needle trembling and then holding, pointing north the way it always does, whatever the weather. You leave it pointing at the empty stool and close the stall for the day.