Small fine line black compass tattoo with a central arrow and a single letter, sitting on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Fine line compass on inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass design shows a thin circle crossed by two diagonal lines, with a long needle-like arrow running vertically through the centre and a tiny letter at the right edge. The linework is delicate and even, and the design is rendered in black ink with no shading. It is shown in a close, shallow-focus photo on the inner forearm, with a plain pale skin background.

Fine line Forearm Compass Arrow Circle Line Letter

Find an artist for this

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 needle had stopped pointing north the spring Mira turned nine. Old Abel Quennell kept the only true instrument left at Saltmarsh Relay, a brass case the size of a hen's egg, and he would not let her hold it until she could draw a circle freehand that closed without a seam. She drew forty before he nodded. The forty-first went onto the slate in chalk: a ring, two crossed lines, a needle running down the centre, and beside the rim, small as a thumbprint, the letter the clerks called the Turned N, because north was wherever the needle said it was.

Keep reading

When the ferryman's boy came up the causeway one morning with fever in his face and no word of his mother, Abel sent Mira after the herd roads with the case buttoned inside her coat. The fen was all reed and standing water, and the needle swung and shivered, now toward the church spire, now toward a drowned barn, now toward nothing at all. She learned to stop walking when it steadied and to wait, the way Abel had taught her to wait for ink to dry. Twice she found the path only because the needle lay still against the sky she could see.

At the third dyke she came on the mother sitting on a sluice gate, her boots full of water, with no compass and no idea which way home lay. Mira saw then what Abel had never said outright: the needle had never pointed anywhere but at whoever was carrying it. She pressed the brass into the woman's palm, closed her fingers round it, and walked back along the bank with the mother behind her, following nothing but her own feet.

That night at the relay she took chalk and a clean slate and drew the circle without lifting her hand. It closed first time. She put the Turned N on the rim, and then, because it seemed the honest thing, she drew the needle pointing at the door.