Colour tattoo of a compass rose with orange falling leaves and blue and pink watercolour splashes on a forearm, in a watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour compass and falling leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of the design, with thin dark linework and a small amount of shading around its points. Orange leaves drift outwards from it, and soft blue, pink and purple washes spread behind the compass to give a loose watercolour effect. The tattoo is shown on the outer forearm against a grey top and blue denim, with the image cropped closely around the arm.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Compass Compass rose Leaves Watercolour splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour was still warm when the brass compass began to turn in the drawer beneath the proving shelf. Mabel Ketteridge heard it tick against the wood and knew she had not shut the drawer properly, though she had not been shutting much of anything properly since the spring the herring boats came home without her Tom. The oven ticked as it cooled. Beyond the back window the sky was the colour of wet slate, and the lane was empty except for leaves.

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Oak leaves, orange as embers, were turning over the cobbles though it was only March. They came in under the door and drifted across the table in a loose trail towards the yard. Her grandmother had always said that a compass in a kitchen was a thing to be fed, not feared. So Mabel wrapped two cobs in a clean cloth, pulled on her boots, and held the needle flat in her palm, following it wherever it swung through the wet streets.

It led her down to the quay, where a boy sat on an upturned crate with his knees drawn up to his chin. He was no older than Tom had been the first time he went to sea, and his fingers were blue with cold. She gave him the bread. He did not thank her. He broke one cob in half and held the larger piece out to her, the way sailors share, while the leaves settled on his shoulders like a cloak.

Walking home, she looked down and found the needle no longer pointed towards the sea. It pointed back up the lane, steady as a church bell, straight at her bakery. The compass had never wanted her to find the water. It had wanted her to find someone hungry and feed them. By the time she reached the oven the sky had gone grey-gold over the chimneys, and the needle lay quiet in her palm, pointing at the door she had left open.