Watercolour-style compass with blue, purple and pink ink drips and black cursive script running down a forearm tattoo.

Watercolour compass and script on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pocket compass with a painted watercolour finish sits near the top of the forearm, its face shaded in blues, greens and purples. Pink, purple and blue ink drips downward from the base of the compass, and a line of black cursive script runs diagonally down the arm beside it. The photograph is taken straight on against a dark background, with the tattoo clearly lit.

Forearm Compass Script Watercolour Drip Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass had belonged to Old Tamsin's husband, who carried it out past the Skerries every morning for forty years and never once looked at it. He said the needle was for strangers. Islanders knew their own way by the wind on the back of the neck and the colour of the water over the sand bars, and the brass case stayed in a drawer with the spare candles.

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When the boat failed to come in during the November gales, the men searched three days and found only an oar and a bag of lines. Tamsin went down to the harbour wall with the compass in her apron pocket. She opened it and watched the needle shiver and settle, pointing north-east, towards the Faroes and nothing but grey water. She went home, filled a cup from the rain butt, and wet the painted face until the colours ran. Pink, violet and blue crept down the brass the way the dusk had come down over the bay that night, and she left them to dry.

She did not sleep. Near dawn she heard the gate and went out with the lamp, half expecting a ghost, but it was the boy from the next croft, grinning and blue with cold. He had put in at the Hoy shore and walked the cliff path in the dark. He said the compass had kept him company the whole way, its needle always leaning back toward the island as if something in it were tugging.

Tamsin looked at the thing in her hand, its colours running and its needle still pointing stubbornly north-east, away from everything they had known. Then she turned it over and laughed, for she had never once thought to check which way the island lay from the sea. The needle had never been for strangers. It had only ever been for coming home.