Traditional style colour tattoo of a compass with red and blue roses and green leaves on an upper arm.

Compass with roses on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose with a red and black needle sits at the centre, ringed by a scalloped border of orange and red dots, with the cardinal letters N, E, S and W marked around it. A blue rose and a red rose, both with green leaves, wrap around the compass on the upper right and lower left. The bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills in red, blue, green, orange and teal are typical of the traditional style, photographed on skin against a dark background.

Traditional Upper arm Compass Rose Leaves Needle Compass rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle has been sulking since the Azores, drifting a few degrees east whenever the wind backs, and you have stopped trusting it before the rest of the watch has. Nineteen days out of Liverpool, the Maud Carrick grinds through a grey swell with her topsails slatting, and Cornelius Bray, the second mate, wants a bearing he can write in the log without his face giving him away.

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You lift the brass pocket compass from its hook and hold it flat on your palm, the way old Tobias taught you, never by the lanyard. The card is cream with the four letters painted in black, and the red-tipped needle wanders, then settles, like a dog choosing where to lie down. Tobias had a rose inked on each forearm, one red for the street his mother lived on and one blue for the Halifax dance hall where he met his wife. He said a man should carry two ways of being lost and found, and that the trick was knowing which one you were standing in.

The fault is not in the needle. It is the iron cargo stacked near the binnacle, and the deviation card Bray keeps pinned in the chart room is three years out of date. You go below with the brass in your fist and make the correction in pencil, one neat line under the old figure, the way Tobias would have wanted.

When you come back up, the wind has stopped backing and the sun is a smear of copper behind the cloud. You write N by E, true, and the ink does not smudge.