Fine line black tattoo on a forearm showing a compass with a fern, mountain peaks, a rain cloud and the letters PNW.

Compass with fern, mountains and rain on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre, with a dotted ring around its middle and arrow points extending outwards. Around it are a fern frond, jagged mountain peaks, a textured cloud with falling raindrops, and the letters PNW in slanted script. The linework is fine and shading is built from hatching and stippling, all in black ink on pale skin.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Compass Compass rose Fern Mountain Cloud Raindrop Arrow Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift was out again, so Nan and I took the stairs to the fourteenth floor with the map between us. It was the old road atlas from her glovebox, creased soft at the corners, and she kept folding it back to the page with Washington on it, as if the state might wander off if she didn't pin it down.

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Her sister Maureen had gone out there in 1979 and never come home for longer than a fortnight. Nan kept a shoebox of her postcards, and nearly all of them were rain: a ferry in grey water, a fern as big as a car, a mountain sitting behind cloud like a man who'd forgotten his hat. "Seattle's the wettest place you'll ever be dry," Maureen had written, and Nan read it aloud every Christmas until it stopped being funny and became a kind of prayer.

On the landing window ledge we drew a compass with a biro on the back of a council letter. Arrows went out to the points, and a dotted ring sat in the middle where she said the ends of the earth met. I wrote PNW because it looked like something you'd stamp on a bag. She said it looked like a sneeze. Below the fern I drew a cloud with raindrops falling off it, and she tapped the drizzle with one finger, pleased, and said that was the bit Maureen would have liked best.

When the lift finally clanked back into life, we rode it up with the atlas tucked under her arm. At the top the whole estate lay spread below us under a low lid of cloud, the hills beyond it no more than a suggestion. Nan pressed her palm to the cold glass and said, "There." I didn't tell her the hills were the same grey as the sky, because she looked happy, and happy was the direction we had agreed on.