Small black compass rose tattoo with a fine line design on the inner wrist, with a rope and anchor bracelet and a nautical chart behind the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand, palm side towards the camera, shows a small compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist, with the points N, E, S and W and a dark central star. The linework is fine and the tattoo is in black ink only, with light shading in the centre. It sits against a blue and cream nautical chart, and a rope and anchor bracelet is worn just below it.

Fine line Forearm Compass Compass rose Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Penhale found the error on a Tuesday in March, when the spring tide dropped low enough to show the Margery Ann's ribs off Carrack Point. The chart pinned in the harbour office said there was four fathoms of clean water there. She had sailed over that ground herself as a girl, and she knew better.

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Her uncle Tom, who had drawn every line on that paper by lamplight, would not hear it. "Compass roses don't lie, Ruth," he said, tapping the little star in the corner, its points N, E, S and W inked as neatly as stitches. "North is north." He had worn the brass dividers on a loop of rope round his wrist for forty years, and the anchor clasp knocked the table each time he leaned over the plans.

She borrowed the dividers anyway and went out on the ebb with the bosun's boy, a notebook in her oilskin and a ruler under her arm. They took soundings from the skiff until the light went copper, and every reading matched her pencil and not his ink. Coming back, the boy asked why she had not just told Uncle Tom outright. She said she had, twice, and he had only asked her to check the bearings again.

That night she took the chart down, laid it flat under the lamp, and drew a fresh rock in red with a small cross beside it. Beneath the compass rose she wrote the date and her own initials, R.P., in the same careful capitals he had taught her. In the morning the mark was still there, and so was he, reading it over her shoulder with his thumb resting on the anchor.