Abstract compass tattoo with a blue watercolour-style wash and black ink splatter across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract compass with blue wash on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of the design, drawn with thin black and grey linework, with loose dark strokes crossing its points. Heavy black ink splatters trail off to the upper right, and bold blue wash shapes sweep behind and below the compass. The composition is off-centre on the back, with the blue wash framing the compass in a loose crescent.

Back Compass Compass rose Ink splatter Brush stroke Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass had been my father's, and by the third day out of Tonopah it was no use to either of us. The needle swung like a drunk's hand. Dust had got under the glass and left a grey bloom across the north, so I kept it in my shirt pocket and steered by the sun, the way he taught me when I was too small to hold the thing steady.

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The road ran straight as a ruler through the flats, grey gravel with nothing either side but creosote and heat. A mirage lay across it every afternoon, a sheet of blue water that lifted and drew back as we closed on it. Hollis, who drove the truck and talked to it when he thought I was asleep, swore it was the same lake every day. He called it Kettle Lake and said we would reach it when we had earned it.

On the fourth morning the sky went the colour of a bruise to the west, and black cloud came over the ridge faster than any cloud should. Hollis stopped the truck and we sat with the windows down, watching rain fall in fat dark drops on the dust a mile off, then closer, until the whole flat smelled of wet stone. I took the compass out and laid it on the dash. The needle had settled. It pointed at the storm, steady as a stone, and for the first time since Tonopah I believed it.

We drove into the rain, and the blue was not a lake after all but a shallow sheet of runoff the gravel had no room for, bright and moving over the road. Hollis laughed until he coughed. That night I wrote the bearing in my notebook the way my father would have, with the date, the ridge, and one word underneath: follow.