Watercolour-style compass tattoo with a feather above it and coloured splashes, on the forearm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black-outlined compass sits at the centre of the design, with a feather-like shape rising above it. Loose sketchy linework and splashes of teal, orange, red and blue radiate from the compass and run down the forearm. The design fills the middle of the forearm, with the arm shown against a plain light wall.

Forearm Compass Feather Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass was already cracked when Eli pressed it into my hand at the stile of Harrow Wood, a hairline running through the glass beneath the N. The needle shivered like a moth against a lamp. 'It still knows where the water is,' he said, which was what he always said when he had no idea where anything was. The village men would not go past the stile. Their wives left bread on the sill anyway, and I took a loaf and went in alone.

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I followed the needle through bracken and birch, past an oak split open like a book. Every so often a grey feather lay across the path, pale as smoke from a snuffed candle, and each time the needle swung towards it as if called by name. The light was going orange behind the branches. I kept my hand around the brass until my palm ached with the cold of it, and I did not look back at the stile, because looking back in that wood only made the trees shift closer.

The Dunmore boy was sitting on a flat stone beside the stream, knees under his chin, drawing circles in the mud with a stick. He said the feathers were his mother's and that she had been leaving them so he would come home. I looked down at the compass. The needle had stopped turning and hung perfectly still, pointing past the water and up the slope through the trees, towards a single yellow window burning in the valley below.

'That's our kitchen,' he said, and began to cry without making a sound. I took his hand and we walked up the hill together, the feathers gathering in my coat pocket one by one, until the wood ran out and the gate creaked open under our hands and somebody was already calling his name.