Black and grey photo of two forearms: the left has a fine line compass star with circles and a dotted vertical line, and the right has a geometric anchor with triangles on the inner forearm.

Compass star and anchor on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a black tattoo. The left arm carries a compass star with radiating dotted rays, overlapping circles and a thin dotted line running down the forearm. The right arm has an anchor framed by fine line triangles and dotted geometric shapes, with a horizontal line across the forearm. The work is entirely black ink in fine lines and dots, and the composition is balanced across the two arms against a dark denim shirt background.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Compass Star Anchor Circle Triangle Dotted line Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table in the back room of the Kittiwake fishing co-operative had been wedged against the damp wall since 1958, and Maureen Pask had never once seen it level. Her brother Dennis insisted the floor sloped toward the harbour mouth and that this was the reason the bottles always rolled out. He had spent forty years at sea believing the land was the thing that moved, so she let him have the chart table.

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The chart itself was a Admiralty sheet of the Dogger Bank, pinned flat with four brass tacks, its soundings in faded blue ink. Someone had drawn a fine dotted line across it from the eastern edge to the anchorage at Sheringham, then ringed a point with a series of overlapping circles, each one a little larger than the last, as if a stone had been dropped into still water and frozen at the moment of spreading. Dennis said the circles were the tide turns. Maureen suspected he had invented that to stop her asking.

On the last Tuesday of the month they took the cutter out in a flat calm, and by noon the sea had lost its edge altogether. Dennis fixed the bearing by a single star he could not see, tapped the glass of the old binnacle twice, and said the anchor was down. She looked over the rail. The water was clear to the sand, and there was nothing below them but their own reflections, two faces leaning over the same dotted line.

They hauled up at four, empty-handed and content, and Maureen pinned the sheet back to the wall with a fifth tack, though there was no fifth hole in the board. Dennis watched her do it and said nothing about the floor.