Pen sketch of a vertical arrow design with a compass, heart and cross on white paper, held beside a pencil in a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical arrow, compass and heart sketch

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds a pencil beside a pen drawing on white paper of a vertical design. From top to bottom it shows an arrow, a compass rose, a heart, a cross and a second arrow, all in black linework. The lines are fine and the compass and arrow feathers have some dotted and hatched detail, with the design centred on a plain pale background.

Fine line Arrow Compass Heart Cross Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Kettle Road pass on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the inn at Hob's Cross held eleven strangers, two goats in the scullery and my father's brass compass hung on a nail above the bar where nobody could knock it. I was nineteen and had been left to pour the ale. The compass was the only thing in the room that never pointed at the fire or the door. Its needle kept turning back to north as if it had an appointment there.

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Mr Ashdown, a surveyor from Carlisle, asked to borrow it that night. He laid it on the table beside a page of his own drawings: arrows pointing up the valley and down, a compass rose ringed with tiny dots, a heart he had crossed out twice. "Everyone wants a bearing," he said, "until they find one they dislike." He tapped the cross he had sketched beneath the heart and told me the old quarry road came out somewhere below Thistle Fell, though nobody had walked it since the rockfall.

On Friday the wind dropped and we went out with a lantern and a length of rope tied to the gatepost. The quarry road was there, buried to the hedge tops, and the needle swung true the whole way down. At the bottom, cut into a grey stone under a rime of ice, we found an arrow pointing back the way we had come, toward the inn, which I would swear had not been there in my father's day.

We followed it home through the drifts, and Mr Ashdown walked behind me without speaking. He left on the Saturday with his drawings rolled under one arm. I kept the compass. I still wind it every morning before I unbolt the shutters, though the road has been clear for years.