Traditional colour tattoo on a thigh showing a compass rose, a blue swallow, a purple rose and a banner reading Not all who wander are lost.

Compass, swallow and rose on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold colour tattoo on the outer thigh combines a compass rose with a blue and red swallow at the upper left and a purple rose at the lower right. A scroll banner across the design reads Not all who wander are lost, and green leaves with red-tipped edges fill the gaps. Thick black outlines and flat, saturated fills in red, blue, yellow and green give the piece a classic old-school look against the skin.

Traditional Thigh Compass Swallow Rose Banner Quote Flower Leaves Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallow went out through the vent before any of us had found the door, a blue knife of a bird, and Ossie swore it was the only navigator aboard with any sense. We had been drifting for nineteen months without a fix. The stars on the forward screens had stopped matching the charts somewhere past the Tern Belt, and the ship's own needle spun like a drunk thing whenever the drive coughed.

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My grandmother kept a brass compass in her coat, the kind with a painted rose under the glass, and she taught me that a needle only lies when you ask it the wrong question. So I stopped asking the ship and asked the bird instead. Ossie had raised the swallow from a hatchling in the greenhouse, among the purple roses the botanists grew for nothing but their scent. Every dawn it went out and came back to the same bulkhead, always with its beak full of something green: moss, leaf-scraps, once a strip of foil.

On the nineteenth day it did not come back to the bulkhead. It came to Ossie's shoulder, dusted with grey, and turned its head toward the aft viewport, where if you looked hard enough there was a smudge of cloud the colour of a bruise. We spent six hours arguing about whether a bird could smell weather across a light-year. Then the drive died for good and we ran on momentum towards the smudge, and I found myself laughing at the banner on Ossie's wrist that said not all who wander are lost. He said the old woman who had written it was only talking about wind.

We made planetfall on a grey shore with the swallow circling above our heads. It dropped once, twice, then turned in a wide arc and set off inland, low over the grass, as if it had something to show us. I took the brass compass from my coat, opened the glass, and let the needle spin. Then I shut it, put it away, and followed the bird.