Black and grey drawing of two crossed arrows with the letters N, E, S and W at the compass points, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows with compass points

Black and grey · Flash

A flat design of two arrows crossed in an X, with fletching at the lower ends and arrowheads pointing up towards north and west. The letters N, E, S and W sit at the four points of the compass around the arrows. The linework is solid with a slightly distressed, grainy fill, shown in charcoal grey on a cream square.

Arrow Compass North South East West Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship had lain three weeks in the doldrums, the water casks down to a finger's depth, when the boy Tobin Reeve asked the old steersman which way home lay. The steersman said nothing. He went below and came back with two ash arrows from the locker, their fletching grey with salt, and gave one to each of the two sailors who had quarrelled over the last of the rum.

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"Fire them," he said, "one north, one west. Wherever they fall, we row."

They drew and loosed. The north arrow flew over the bow and dropped into a sea as flat as slate. The west arrow went into the glare and was lost. The men argued until sundown, one swearing the north arrow had landed nearer the sky than the water, the other that the west one had struck something hard. Neither was right and neither was wrong. In the night a wind came up out of the south, the way it does when a sea has finished sulking.

They sailed on that wind until the coast of Pell rose blue and then green. The steersman nailed the two arrows above the chart table, crossed in an X, their heads pointing the way the men had argued. When Tobin was an old man himself, living in Pell with a table of his own, his grandchildren asked him which way was home. He took down the crossed shafts, blew the dust off them, and told them to fire, and they always laughed and went to find the bow.