Two watercolour-style compass tattoos with paint-like drips in pink, blue and orange, one on the thigh and one on the calf.

Watercolour compass on thigh and calf

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The image shows the back of a person's legs, with a compass tattoo on the upper thigh and a smaller compass on the calf. Both designs have loose, sketchy outlines and soft washes of colour that run downwards in drips. The colours are pink, orange, purple and blue, and the tattoos sit against a plain grey background.

Thigh Calf Compass Pocket watch Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the Stile pass for nine days, and on the tenth Maud Harrow found a carter sitting in a drift below the inn gate. His mule had come down the track alone, its bells silent and its saddle bags sagging. The man's hands were too cold to close, so she prised open his fingers and took out a brass compass with the glass cracked across the middle.

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"Where's the road?" he asked. She told him the road was under four feet of white, and he laughed as though she had made a joke. He said a stranger had sold him the compass at the fair in Harrowgate, promising it would never lie about home. For two days he had followed its needle, and it had swung him in circles above the valley until he could no longer tell up from down.

Maud turned the compass over in the lamplight. The needle was not pointing north. It trembled towards the kitchen window, towards the bread proving by the stove and the kettle she had left on the hob. Dye from the cheap paper inside had bled through the cracked glass, and pink and blue ran down the brass in thin streaks, the way meltwater runs from the eaves in March.

She kept him by the fire until the thaw. When he left, he took the mule and not the compass. Maud hung it on a nail above the hearth, where it still hangs. Travellers ask why it points at the stove, and she tells them it has learned what matters. Ask it the way north, and it will point at the door, where somebody is always stamping snow from their boots.