Fine line black compass tattoo with a letter N and north arrow on the inner forearm, shown in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass tattoo on inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass design sits on the inner forearm, with a letter N above a compass rose and a long arrow pointing towards the wrist. The linework is thin and solid black with no shading, and the photo is in black and white. A wristwatch with a dark strap is worn on the same wrist, and the person's face is not visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table on the Marigold had a crack running across it, and I had been meaning to fill it with resin since Stoke. Ruth never let me forget the things I meant to do. She was steering the narrowboat through the lock at Hatton, the water roaring out of the bottom gates like a train, and she called back over her shoulder that the needle on my compass had gone soft again. I told her a compass doesn't go soft. It points where it points. She said that was exactly the trouble with it.

Keep reading

We had bought the brass compass off a stall in Birmingham for four pounds, a Sunday when the market was packing up and the trader wanted to be shot of it. I kept it in the drawer with the spare fuses and the bent windlass. Ruth used to say I navigated by memory and by the pub signs, and she was mostly right. The canal does not care about north. It only cares that you keep to the towpath side and mind the moorings where the fishermen sit.

At the top of Hatton we tied up beside a row of empty boats and walked up to the café for tea. Ruth took out a biro and drew a small rose on the back of a napkin, the four points and the long arrow. She pushed it across the table at me. Go on, she said, tell me which way is home. I looked at the arrow pointing down towards the wrist of her own drawing, and I laughed, because it pointed straight at the cold tea and the sugar bowl and nowhere else at all.

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