Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of two compasses, one with an anchor, with black linework triangles and splashes of blue, pink and green on a forearm.

Watercolour compass and anchor on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two compasses, one overlapping the other, with a white anchor inside the upper compass face. Fine black outlines and a sketched circle sit alongside black triangle linework, while soft purple, blue, pink and green washes and paint splatters fill the background. The compasses are shaded with smooth gradients and the composition runs diagonally across the limb.

Geometric Forearm Compass Anchor Triangle Watercolour splash Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Garside bought the dead compass from a pawnshop on Church Street for four shillings, though the man behind the counter swore it had belonged to a trawlerman who never once pointed it the right way. She carried it home in her coat pocket. That evening she laid it beside her grandfather's compass on the kitchen table, the one with the anchor stamped into its lid, and tapped the glass until the needle shivered.

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Her grandfather had taught her that a compass only lies when you let it. He used to sit her on the harbour wall at Staithes with the two of them open in her lap, the brass lids scratched bright from years of pockets, and tell her that north was a habit you kept by checking. The anchor, he said, was for the day you forgot which way was home. She had thought him soft then. Now the chart table was flaking and the crossing charts sat unfinished under her elbow.

The new needle swung, hesitated, and settled on nothing she recognised. She turned the case on the oilcloth and it swung back to the same stubborn point. Through the window the tide was pulling out over the slipway, and she understood the thing was not broken. It was pointing at the harbour wall, at the bench where his folded rug still lay over the arm.

She didn't fix it. She wrapped the dead compass in a tea towel, set her grandfather's on top so the two faces overlapped like a pair of moons, and wrote on the back of an invoice: low water, Staithes, ask again tomorrow. Then she took her coat off the hook and went down to see who was on the wall.