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

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows with compass points

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two arrows crossed in an X shape, with their fletched tails at the bottom and arrowheads pointing up towards N and the top corners. The compass letters N, E, S and W surround the arrows in a matching distressed serif style. The drawing uses black and grey tones with a speckled, worn texture on a plain cream background.

Arrow Crossed arrows Compass North East South West

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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 sign-writer's shop on Hallam Row had been shut since Michaelmas, but the key still hung where Mr Pryce always left it, under the lip of the gutter. I let myself in past midnight with a torch in my teeth and found the brushes exactly where he'd dropped them, stiff with old ochre.

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He had left me a commission, pinned to the wall above the bench: a shop front for a map dealer on Quay Street, and beneath the instructions a rough sketch of two arrows crossed like swords, their feathered tails low, the points aimed at the four corners of the paper. N at the top, E to the right, S below, W to the left. Nothing else. No note about the fee.

I spent three nights on it. The letters came easiest, serifs flared like the wings of gulls, but the arrows fought me. Every time I blended the grey they looked like they were falling rather than pointing. On the fourth night the rain came sideways off the estuary and I gave up trying to be clean. I dragged a dry brush across the boards so the paint broke up and grained, the way the ground looks when a city has been walked on for two hundred years.

When the widow came to collect it she stood in the street a long time, reading the letters, then said, "He always put the arrows pointing home, you know. Whichever way you walked, one of them would tell you where to go." She paid me in cash and asked nothing else.

Walking back past the docks I noticed I had been tilting my head, checking the sky for the wind. Some habits you only learn from the marks other people leave behind.