Two matching black and grey tattoos of a compass and a clock with flowers and a script banner, shown on the inner forearms.

Matching compass and clock tattoos on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching designs sit side by side on the inner forearms, each showing a pocket watch style frame with flowers and a ribbon banner. The left design has a compass rose at its centre and the right has a clock face with Roman numerals, both drawn in fine black linework with soft grey shading. The palette is entirely black and grey against a pale, softly blurred background.

Traditional Forearm Compass Clock Pocket watch Flower Banner Script Roman numeral Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the horologe at Saint Oda's for thirty-one years, and in all that time he never once let the great wheel run a minute slow. Then Tobias came up the cloister stair with a leather case under his arm and a face like a squall, and asked me to mend his father's pocket compass.

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I told him the needle was honest enough. It was the case that had cracked, the lid hinge gone brittle in the damp off the marsh. I sat him on the bench under the bell rope and we eased it open with a bradawl while the Sext bell rang overhead and rattled the window glass.

He was sailing for the Baltic at dawn, he said, with a Dutch captain who wanted a boy who could read charts and not be sick. He wanted the compass to point true. I told him it always pointed true to something, which is the most any needle can promise.

In the morning the tide went out early and I stood on the seawall with the old pocket watch I had meant to return to the abbot. It had stopped at a quarter past four. I wound it, and it ticked as if it had never been idle, and Tobias's sail was already a grey thumbprint on the water.