Small black compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W markings on a forearm, near woven bracelets and a mustard knit sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small compass rose on the forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose sits on the forearm, with the cardinal points N, E, S and W set around a central star. The linework is crisp and dark, and the design is shaded in black and grey with no colour ink. The photo is framed close on the arm, with a mustard knit sleeve and woven bracelets softly out of focus at the left.

Forearm Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Star Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass card had been swinging for three days before Mr Pell admitted the binnacle was wrong, and by then we were running south of the Cape with nothing but the sun to trust. I was seventeen and paid a shilling a week to hold the lamp and keep my mouth shut, so I did the first and tried the second. Pell tapped the glass with a bent pencil and said the rose was fine, it was the ship that had turned around under it.

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Pell had drawn the rose himself on the corner of the chart table, ink pressed hard so the wet wouldn't smudge it: four points, a star at the heart, the letters set just so a man could read north from anywhere on the deck. He said the star was the only honest part of it. The points pointed at places a man wanted to reach. The star just sat there, marking where you actually were.

That night the wind backed to the west and the captain sent us aloft to take in sail. Up in the fore top, with the rope burning my palms and the sea a grey floor far below, I found I could see the whole ship at once, and the binnacle lamp glowing on deck like a small sun. I shouted the bearing down. Pell wrote it in his book without looking up, and the ship held her course.

We made Table Bay eleven days late, and nobody thanked the compass. Pell bought me a pint in a dockside pub and folded a clean sheet of paper into my palm. On it was a rose, four points and a star, and in the middle he had written my name. I still carry it folded in my wallet. Some mornings I check the wind against it, and some mornings I just look at the star.