Two forearms show matching black and grey compass and rose tattoos with script running alongside them.

Matching compass and rose forearm tattoos

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a matching tattoo of a compass over a shaded rose with leaves beneath it. The linework and shading are soft and detailed, with the rose showing strong tonal contrast. Thin script runs down the inner side of each arm, set against a wooden floor.

Realism Botanical Forearm Compass Rose Script Leaves Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had belonged to the skipper's father, and when the Mary Ellen went out past the breakwater at Skerrow the needle would not settle. Tam Greer tapped the glass twice with his knuckle and it swung and held north-east, as if something out there were calling it. The men said nothing. They had been at sea long enough to know that a needle only lies when the sea does.

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Two days later the fog came down thick as wet wool. The boats of the fleet lost one another, their horns answering in the grey like cows across a valley. Greer's daughter Isla kept the lamp lit in the harbour window, as her mother had, and at each turn of the tide she wrote the names of the boats on the back of a seed packet and pinned them to the frame. She wrote them in the plain hand the schoolmaster had taught her, with the roses from the wall outside the cottage drawn in the margin.

On the third morning the Mary Ellen came in low, her sail patched with a red flour sack, and Greer stepped onto the slip with a rope of kelp tangled around his boot. He said the needle had pointed them home through the whole night, steady as a hand on a shoulder. Isla asked him which way home had been. He looked at the water a long while and said, the way the rose was leaning.

After that the fleet fixed its bearings by Isla's roses instead of brass, and when the fog came down the men would tell one another, only half joking, that they could smell the way home before they saw it.