Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion's face beside a compass rose on the upper arm and shoulder, with the words Revelation 5:5 running down the arm.

Lion and compass on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder. A realistic lion's face, with shaded fur and a detailed eye, sits on the right half of the design, while a compass rose with N, E and S markings and a faint circular dial fills the left. The words Revelation 5:5 are set vertically in a serif script along the lower arm, and the shading is soft and smoky against the skin.

Realism Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Lion Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the market town of Harrowmere, the mapmaker Ada Penrose kept a brass compass on her windowsill, and every morning its needle swung north and pointed at nothing she could see. The fishermen said it was the lodestone. The vicar said it was the Lord's own finger. Ada said only that the needle had been wrong since the winter the lion came down off the moor.

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Nobody believed the lion had been a lion. Mr Tolley at the ironmongers swore it was a mangy dog, and the constable found only a paw print the size of a dinner plate pressed into the frost on Bell Lane. But the beast stayed three weeks, sleeping under the chapel steps, and each dawn it turned its head to face the same quarter, with one side of its face in shadow and the other lit gold, as if it were waiting to be read.

On the twenty-first night Ada took her compass and walked out to the chapel with a lantern. The lion lifted its head. Its eyes met hers and it did not roar. It only breathed out, and the needle spun and stopped on the south, the one direction the old parish chart had never bothered to draw. She followed it down the coast road until the lion was gone, and where the chart ran off the edge of the paper she found a gate standing open in a stone wall.

The lintel had words cut into it, and Ada knew the verse before she read it. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda hath prevailed. She folded her map along the crease where south became north, and she never again told anyone the needle was wrong.