Traditional style compass tattoo with a red rose and rope detail on a forearm, shown in three close-up photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional compass with rose and rope

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold compass with a blue eight-point star at its centre, surrounded by a ring marked N, E, S and W and a red rose with green leaves. A coiled rope runs around the design, and the compass has black outlines with orange and yellow shading. The collage shows one wide view and two close-up details of the linework and colour.

Traditional Forearm Compass Compass rose Rose Rope Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In Hollin Dale the forest begins where the last orchard wall gives out, and folk keep to the path between the two stiles. Old Maud Tennant carried a brass compass in her apron pocket for fifty years and never opened it on the path. Its needle, she said, pointed at whatever you were most afraid of losing, and she had no wish to be told what that was.

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The autumn the miller's boy went in after the strays, the whole village stood at the wall calling his name. Maud did not call. She took out the compass, flipped the lid where a red rose and green leaves were painted, and threaded a length of blue cord through its ring. She knotted the other end to the gatepost and gave the miller the slack.

"Hold that," she said, and went in paying out the rope behind her. The needle did not seek north. It swung past the beeches and the dead oak with the iron hook, and settled on a hollow where the boy sat hugging the goats and singing a sea shanty to keep his nerve. Maud walked the line the needle drew, and the cord ran taut through the bracken like a mooring rope.

They came out at dusk, all three of them and the goats. Maud coiled the cord over her elbow the way her father had taught her on the quay, and hung the compass back in her apron. Next morning she checked it again. The needle pointed at the gatepost, where the rope was still tied, and she left it there.