Three arms with black fine line tattoos: a script quote, a small dolphin, and a compass rose on a forearm, with red stripes on one wrist.

Quote lettering and compass rose on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three arms are held together, each carrying black tattoos. One forearm shows a compass rose with a line of lettering running along it, while the middle arm has a small dolphin motif and a short quote set in several lines. Thin black linework dominates, with a few red stripes wrapping one wrist.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Quote Lettering Script Dolphin Compass rose Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, the kettle's not boiled yet, and I'll not tell this one twice. You want to hear about the Cattering Sound, and the November the fog came in off the Minch and sat on Skerrin like a wet dog. Old Ruairidh Gunn had a boat called the Mairi and a brass compass his grandfather carried up from Stornoway, and that compass was the only thing on the island that never lied to anyone.

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That month he went out for the lobster pots with his boy, Ewan, who was nine and talked the whole way out. By noon the fog had swallowed the lighthouse. Ruairidh tapped the glass and the needle would not settle. It swung round like a drunk man at a ceilidh, and he swore it was pointing at the water itself.

Then the dolphins came. Six of them, grey and quick, rising either side of the bow and sounding in a way that made the hull hum under your boots. The old folk called them the sound's pilots, and you followed them or you drowned. So he followed. Ewan laughed and threw his cap at them, and one turned its eye on the boy as if to say, mind yourself.

They brought the Mairi through the rocks at the Teeth and into the lee of the pier, and the fog lifted like a sheet off a bed. When the needle finally settled, it lay pointing at the dolphin that had come last, sleek and slow, curling away into the grey. Ruairidh never bought a new compass. He said a man should know where he's been as well as where he's going, and that the sea keeps its own north.