Black and grey realism tattoos of roses, a compass and script on a woman's leg and thigh, with small birds on the ankle, photographed in a bath.

Rose and compass leg sleeve with script

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The left leg carries a dense black and grey design of realistic roses, a compass and fine botanical leaves, running from the ankle to the thigh. The right thigh and calf are covered in long handwritten cursive script set in fine, even linework, and small bird outlines sit on the top of the foot. The photograph is taken from above in a white bath with tiled walls behind, and the shading is soft and well defined.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle was still ticking when Mrs Abernethy found the tin under the stairs, its lid furred with sea salt and a brass compass rusted fast to the glass. She read the first line out loud to the empty kitchen, the way her grandfather used to read the shipping news, slowly, as if the words might bolt if she hurried them.

Keep reading

"My dearest Tom, the compass you left me points north in the mornings and south by supper, so I have stopped trusting it and started trusting the roses on the back wall. They came into flower the week your ship went out. I have counted every petal since, which is a poor sort of navigation, but it keeps me up at night and keeps me in the garden, and the garden is the only place I am certain of anything."

The letters went on for pages. Each one mentioned the swallows nesting under the chapel eaves, the price of coal, the harbourmaster who never once answered her, and a rhyme she had written out in a looping hand along the margin of every sheet. She had sent them all to a ship's agent in Valparaiso, then to a boarding house in Cork, then to nobody at all, because by the autumn the postmark had stopped meaning anything.

The last page was in a different hand, shakier and smaller. It said only that the ink had run dry at the bottom of the bottle, that she had gone on with a pencil, and that the roses had dropped their heads in the frost. Mrs Abernethy turned the compass over in her palm. The needle had seized, but when she tapped the glass it swung once, uncertainly, and settled pointing at the window, where the first grey light was coming up over the bay.

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