Watercolour-style compass tattoo on the inner forearm, with black linework and pink and blue wash, an arrow pointing south and N and S letters.

Compass with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm carries a compass design with a black outlined compass rose, tick marks around the rim and an arrow-shaped pointer extending towards the lower edge, with small N and S letters beside the points. Fine black linework is combined with soft pink and blue wash that bleeds beyond the outline, giving a loose painterly effect. The compass sits centrally on the arm, with the rest of the forearm and a navy garment visible around it.

Forearm Compass Compass rose Arrow Feather Letter North South

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had dried wrong again, so Hester Vane scraped the rose off the vellum with her thumbnail and began it a third time. Her father had taught her that a compass wanted its needle first and its letters last, but the sea off Pennick Cove had never kept to rules. Brass pins and rain-spotted charts lay across the long table, and the window smelt of tar and wet hemp.

Keep reading

The commission came from Mrs Abigail Coombe, whose son had gone out in the Gull three winters back and not come home. She wanted a chart for his wall, the coast as he had known it, with a compass on it that pointed the way he had gone. Hester did not tell her that a compass only ever points north. She laid the wash first, rose and pink and a cold blue like the bay at dawn, and let the colour spill past the rim where the paper could not hold it.

On the last evening she inked the pointer. Instead of the usual steel point she drew a feather, quill-fine, angled south-east toward the open water. Mrs Coombe came for the chart in the rain and stood a long time over it. 'That's not a needle,' she said. 'No,' said Hester. 'It's where the wind keeps taking things.' The old woman folded the sheet into her coat and did not ask for her money back.