Black and grey realism tattoo of three roses and a compass with script above, on the outer thigh.

Roses and compass on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic black and grey tattoo of three roses, one at the top and two lower down, with a pocket compass in front of the lower roses. Cursive script above the roses reads "If you never get lost, then you never get found". Smooth shading gives the petals depth and the compass face fine linework, and the composition wraps diagonally across the thigh.

Realism Lettering Thigh Rose Compass Script Quote Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass lived in the wheelhouse drawer with the tide tables and a tin of pear drops, and my father never once took it out to find north. He read the river instead: the colour of the water over the weir, the way the reeds leaned, the smell of the mill at Abingdon. I was nine before I asked him what the compass was for.

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He said it was my grandmother's, bought off a sailor in Gravesend for two shillings, and that it had gone overboard twice and been fished back out both times. The summer my mother left, he painted the roses on the cabin side himself, three of them, each as wide as a dinner plate. He sat looking at them a long while before he added the words in a curly hand he copied from a hymn book. Nobody on the boat ever read them out loud.

The fog came down on us at Culham one October, thick as wool, and the towpath vanished. Dad stood at the tiller with his hands flat on the wood and said nothing for a full minute, which frightened me more than the fog. Then he pressed the compass into my palm, its glass cold and beaded, and told me to hold it level and say where the bow was pointing.

The needle swung and settled, and I shouted that we faced north, which I did not believe. 'Good,' he said. 'Then we're only lost to the fog, not to ourselves.' We crept on by the sound of the lock gates until the sun burned through. The compass sits on my own shelf now, its face a little dim. I never trust it to tell me the way, but I take it down when I want to remember the river knew where it was going.