Black fine line compass tattoo with N, E, S and W markings and curved arrows, on the inner upper arm.

Fine line compass on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular compass rose with the cardinal points labelled N, E, S and W, crossed by a central star of fine lines and dotted arcs. Curved arrows run around the outer ring and across the centre, drawn with delicate single-needle linework and light stippled shading. The design is rendered in black ink on pale skin, with a soft blurred background behind the arm.

Fine line Upper arm Compass Compass rose Arrow Circle Cardinal points Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The widow brought the compass in wrapped in a tea towel, as if it might bruise. It had sat in a drawer in Scarborough for twelve years, she said, and it had never once pointed true since her husband came home with it. I told her a needle does not drift out of sentiment. I opened the case on my bench under the lamp and saw that somebody had reset the card.

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A fine ring of arrows ran round the rose, each one curving clockwise like the hands of a slow clock, and across the centre sat a star of single-stroke lines and dotted arcs. The lettering was careful, N and E and S and W, but the north had been scratched out and redrawn twice. I have seen charts drawn by men who were lost and wanted to be found. This was the work of a man who knew exactly where he stood and wanted the card to agree with him.

Her husband, Edwin Ferris, had surveyed for the railway, she told me, and his last winter he walked the same field above the Esk with a theodolite and a notebook. When I held the card to the window, the arrows lined up. Every one of them pointed to a single stippled dot on the hill, with a tiny cross beside it, and beyond it the lane that ran down to her front gate.

I set the needle true, polished the glass and handed it back. She asked what I owed. I said nothing, only that it would point home now and she had merely to follow it. She turned the compass over in her palm for a long while before she slipped it into her coat, and I heard the lid click shut like a door she had been waiting to open.