Black ink tattoo of crossed arrows forming a compass with N, E, S and W, above and below the script words Not all those who wander are lost, on a forearm.

Crossed arrow compass with quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two crossed arrows with arrowheads at the top right and bottom left, with the letters N, E, S and W placed at the four points of the compass centre. Script lettering reads Not all those who wander are lost, with one line above the arrows and one below. The linework is solid black with little shading, and the photograph has a warm, vintage-style filter.

Lettering Forearm Compass Arrow Quote Script North East South West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had walked the yew maze at Corran Hall so often she could have done it blind, which was just as well, because the mist came off the moor before noon and swallowed the gravel paths whole. Her father's brass compass hung from her wrist on a cord. The needle swung, settled, swung again, and she had stopped trusting it somewhere around the second bend.

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At every junction stood a stone post cut with two crossed arrows, the same arrows the steward Ambrose had chiselled into the orchard gate, and beneath them the four letters the rain had nearly worn away. Ambrose had been a wanderer. He walked to the coast and back twice a year and never once explained where he had been. The gardeners said he could find his way out of a locked room. They also said that when he was old he sat on the bench by the sundial and told anyone who asked that a man who has never been lost has never really looked at anything.

The posts did not agree with the compass. Each arrowhead pointed where Ambrose had gone, not where the needle said the world was, and so Maud stopped asking the brass which way was home and followed the stone instead. She went by the arrow that pointed up and to the right, then by the one that pointed down and to the left, until the yew gave way to the open lawn and the sundial stood grey in the mist.

Her father was sitting on the bench with a lantern at his feet. He had come by the same posts. "I took a wrong turn at the rose walk," he said, not looking up. Maud unhooked the compass and laid it on the stone, and the needle wavered once and then pointed at the lantern.