Sketch-style elephant head tattoo with red and teal watercolour washes and a compass rose on the inner forearm, above a line of dots.

Elephant head and compass on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A fine black linework elephant head sits on the forearm, with a compass rose at the lower end and a column of dots running up from the top of the arm. Loose red and teal watercolour washes sit over and around the linework, with faint script trailing along the right side. The composition is vertical, filling the frame against a bathroom sink in the background.

Forearm Elephant Compass Dot Watercolour Linework Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule has stopped again at the third switchback, and you know better than to coax it. Your grandmother's compass sits in your palm, its needle shivering towards the north-west wall of the pass, where the cloud is tearing apart like wet paper. Nobody in Kessel Dal has crossed the Grey Saddle since the snows came early, and the drover who swore he would take you over for a silver spoon is now asleep under a blanket in the valley inn.

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Ahead, the rock has the shape of a great grey head, trunk lowered as if drinking from the stream below. Your uncle called it the Old Keeper. He said the elephant traders had carried one up here a century ago, and it had walked into the cold and never walked out, which is why the pass was called the Tusk for a while. You do not believe him, but you touch the stone for luck anyway, and the red lichen dotting your glove looks like the marks he used to make on the margins of his own maps.

Halfway up the scree you lose the path entirely. The compass spins, then settles, and you follow the thin blue-green thread of meltwater that the needle has been trying to show you all along. Someone has scratched words into a flat stone at the next bend, half worn away: keep the sun on your left hand. You do, and by dusk the cloud parts and the valley lights lie beneath you, scattered like the dots your uncle inked down the edge of your first map.

You unroll that map on the cairn and mark the pass in red ink, pressing hard so it bleeds through to the back. Then you start down, slowly, with the compass in your coat pocket and the mule finally falling into step behind you.