Fine line black and grey tattoo of a vegvisir compass with a swallow in the centre, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vegvisir compass with swallow on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a vegvisir, an Icelandic runic compass, sits on the inner forearm with a swallow in flight at its centre. The runic arms are drawn in thin, even linework, while the bird has soft shading on its wings and body. The design is centred in the frame against a pale, softly blurred background.

Fine line Forearm Compass Swallow Bird Rune

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last northbound has already gone when you find the compass in the lost property tin, under a damp umbrella and a child's mitten. It is brass, the size of a biscuit, with eight arms that look more like rakes than needles, and a swallow fixed in the middle as if it has just stopped to rest. Nobody has claimed it in eleven weeks. You turn it over twice and the swallow never moves. Outside, the rain bends the platform lamps into long yellow fingers.

Keep reading

Mr Okafor from the signal box rings through to ask if you're staying late again. You tell him yes, because the cleaners don't come until six and because the tin is yours to keep track of. You have always liked this old station, its iron canopy and the swallows that nest in the gutters each April and leave in September without a word of goodbye. You hold the compass flat on your palm and turn it slowly until the swallow faces the far end of the platform, where the tracks run out into fields and dark.

That is when you notice the arms are not decorative after all. Someone has scratched a small notch beside each one with a pocket knife, and the notches spell out a timetable. Platform four. Twenty past ten. Then a name you do not know, and beneath it, in the same careful hand, the words you'll find me where the birds go.

At ten past ten you walk to platform four with the compass in your coat. The swallows left a month ago, but one late straggler is circling the lamp above a bench where a man in a green anorak sits reading a timetable upside down. He looks up. The bird drops from the lamp and crosses the light straight between you, as if it has been waiting for you to arrive.