Fine line black tattoo of a circle divided by spokes with a dashed arrow, on the inner forearm, with cursive script tattooed below.

Fine line circle and arrow on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a circle with concentric inner rings, radiating spokes and a half-section shaded by a solid outline. Dashed lines and small arrowheads extend outward from the centre, giving a diagram or compass-like look. The ink is black on pale skin, shown in close-up on the forearm with a cursive script partly visible at the bottom edge.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Circle Arrow Dashed line Compass Script

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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

"Hold the plate level, Nell, or the north will lie to you." My father said it every morning while the kettle went cold on the bench, and I never once got the bubble centred before he snatched the brass from me.

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The workshop smelled of paraffin and lamp oil. Behind the counter stood the drawer of dial blanks he had cut for every vessel that left the Humber in forty years, each one ruled with eight spokes and two rings, so a helmsman could read the bearing without thinking. He had drawn one for the Margaret Ann the week before she sailed, and it hung on the wall still, the arrow pointing west with a dotted line trailing past the edge of the paper, as if the wind had not finished with it.

Nobody had told him the Margaret Ann would not come back. The Board of Trade men told us in February, with their hats in their hands. My father did not take his hat off. He only went to the drawer, took out the dial, and began to rule a second circle inside the first, very slowly, the way you would write a name you did not want to finish.

I finished it for him that night. I drew the half-section dark with the ruler and the pen, the side that faced the sea, and I set the arrow so the dashed line ran out past the margin, toward whatever waters a dial could still reach. When he came down at dawn he looked at it a long time. Then he tapped the glass and said, "Now you have made it true," and went to put the kettle on.