Hand-drawn sketch of two crossed arrows with the letters N, E, S and W marking the compass points, in dark grey line on a pale background.

Crossed arrows with compass points sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink drawing of two arrows crossing in an X shape, with arrowheads at the top left and top right and feathered fletching at the bottom. The letters N, E, S and W sit in the four quadrants to mark the compass points. The lines are uniform and dark grey on a pale, plain background, with the design centred in the frame.

Arrow Compass Letter North South East West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Margaret Lowe asked the cook which way we were headed, which suited me. I had the galley, a coal range that smoked whenever the wind came from the west, and a tin of ship's biscuit I guarded like a bank. The brass compass hung above the chart table where the mate could see it from his chair, and it had been lying to us since Stornoway.

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The trouble was the cargo. Iron rails stowed low in the forehold dragged the needle sideways, and the second mate swore it pointed nowhere but at the bottom of the sea. Mr Pryor wanted the thing unbolted and thrown over the side. I went up with a pot of mutton broth to make the argument less loud, and found him bent over the binnacle with a pencil, scratching four letters on the back of a tide table: N, E, S, W, and two arrows crossed between them like a child's drawing of a kite.

'Those arrows point true,' I said. 'The men don't need a needle to know where the bow is. They need the sun.'

He looked at me as if I'd gone soft in the head. But that noon I stood at the galley hatch with the sun full on my back, laid a broom handle along the shadow of the rail and let it fall across his scribbled X. It fell where the arrows fell. We steered by that, and by the third morning the needle had settled, though none of us trusted it.

Pryor kept the drawing. He pinned it above the stove where the steam curled round the edges, and every time I stirred the pot he tapped the corner and nodded at the N, as if we had struck a bargain.