Black and grey realism tattoo of three roses and a compass with script on a upper thigh.

Roses and compass with script on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three realistic roses, one at the top and two lower down, alongside a detailed compass with a ring at its base. Handwritten script above the roses reads "If you never get lost then you never get found". The work uses fine shading and soft grey gradients, with the composition wrapping diagonally across the thigh.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Halloran,

Keep reading

The compass came in on the 7.40 from Carlisle, wrapped in a handkerchief with three dried roses pressed flat between the pages of a seed catalogue. Nobody claimed it. I have kept it in the drawer under the ticket stamp for eleven weeks, and this morning I opened the lid to check the needle still swung, and it does, north-west, steady as a station clock. I thought you should know that before anything else.

The roses are the difficulty. Your letter says they came from your mother's bush behind the chapel in Brampton, and that she gave you the compass the day you left for the training college so you would always know which way the sea lay. You wrote that the lid was dented where you dropped it on the platform at Carlisle, and that you were too ashamed to go back for it. I have read that line four times. Men do not usually write about their shame in lost property queries.

So here it is, returned by post, with the handkerchief folded inside. Keep the roses. I have copied out the verse from the chapel noticeboard on a slip of card and tucked it in with the compass, because your mother must have written it there in the same looped hand as her Christmas cards. If you never get lost, then you never get found. I did not understand it when I first read it. I think I do now.

Yours sincerely, with the station's best wishes, Margaret Dunn Lost Property, Penrith

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