Traditional colour tattoo of a red rose with green leaves and yellow star points on a forearm, with a small script letter N above it.

Red rose and star on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red rose with shaded petals and a curled centre sits in the middle of the design, surrounded by green leaves and pointed yellow and black star rays. A faint circular grid sits behind the rose, and a small black script letter N floats above it. Bold black outlines and smooth red and green shading make the colours stand out against the skin.

Traditional Forearm Rose Star Leaves Circle Grid Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had taken the well again, so Mary Hobday walked the ice-rimmed lane to the Lorne farm with a bucket on each arm and the wind coming straight off the moor. Her brother had gone up the hill the morning before to fetch the ewes and had not come down. Nobody at Cold Ashby expected her to go looking, but she had her grandmother's compass, a brass thing with a cracked lid, and her grandmother's habit of saying that north is where the stubborn point.

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She went up past the gate with the iron rose on it and past the drystone wall that ran in a grid across the fell, counting the squares as the old woman had taught her, one square for every hour of light left. At the top of the third field the snow had turned blue, and the sky was empty except for one white star hanging low over the north shoulder. The needle shivered and settled. She followed the star and the needle together, and whenever the wall gave out she kept to the faint rays of frost on the stones.

She found Tom in a hollow under the thorn tree, his hands jammed in his armpits and a ewe lying quiet against his legs. He had a knife's crooked N cut into the bark beside him, where he had tried to keep his mind busy while the cold got in. She knelt, pulled off her gloves and held the compass close to his face. "North," she said. "Just keep it pointing where I point."

They came down at dawn with the ewe between them and the light rising red over the rooftops. At the gate Mary stopped, breathing hard, and looked back at the hill. The star had gone out. She did not mind. She had her brother, the ewe, and the compass warm in her palm, and that was direction enough.