Traditional-style tattoo on a forearm showing a yellow-rimmed compass with a red and black star, a red rose with green leaves below, and a serpent wrapping around the compass.

Traditional compass and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pocket compass with a yellow ring, red and black star face and a looped top sits at the centre of the forearm, with a serpent coiled around it and a dark-tipped red sprig rising above. A red rose with white highlights and green leaves sits beneath the compass, and leaves are scattered around the arm. Bold black outlines and solid fills create the flat, saturated look of traditional work, with a light background of skin, shorts and a chair behind the arm.

Traditional Forearm Compass Rose Snake Serpent Leaves Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had stopped at north for three days, and Maud Pargeter swore it was the ferryman's fault for leaning on the rail. Her father had always said a compass lied only when you wanted it to, so she tapped the glass with a fingernail and watched the red star inside refuse to budge. Below the decks the Mary Ellen creaked against her moorings in Porthcarrow harbour, and the gulls were already fighting over the morning's cod on the quay.

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Her brother Tom came up the companionway with two mugs of stewed tea and a face like wet sacking. He had been drinking with the Penhallow boys again, and the bruise over his eye was the colour of the roses Mrs Trelawny grew against the chapel wall. He set a mug on the chart table and looked at the compass, then at her, and said nothing about the bruise. That was how they had always managed.

"It's not the ferryman," he said finally. "It's the snake."

She laughed, because it was absurd, but when she turned the little compass over the serpent curled round its brass ring seemed to have shifted, its red-tipped crest pointing back toward the land. Tom reached for the cloth, wiped the glass, and held it up to the grey window light. The needle swung, slow and certain, and settled on the south-west, where the sea went on and on.

Maud closed her fingers around it. "Then we go where it says," she said, and went to fetch the oilskins.