Traditional colour tattoo of an anchor with a green and red compass rose at its centre, on a lower leg.

Anchor and compass rose on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A traditional-style anchor sits behind a compass rose with a black eight-pointed star, set within a teal and mustard ring. Red, green, yellow and teal ink is used, with bold black outlines and solid fills, and the design fills the centre of the frame. Small leaf-like shapes and teal dots surround the compass, with partial tattoos visible at the edges of the image.

Traditional Calf Anchor Compass Compass rose Star Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart had gone soft at the folds by the time Tomasz Wirth unrolled it on the galley table, and the coffee ring from some earlier voyage sat right over Plymouth. Nobody aboard the Mercy Jane trusted the fixed compass since the cabin stove had cracked it, so the mate, a Cornish widow's son called Pell, went up on deck each dawn with the brass rose in his palm and squinted at it against the grey sky. He'd tap the needle, mutter, and swear the north was sulking.

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On the third morning out of Falmouth the wind dropped to nothing and the swell lifted the hull like a sleeping dog's ribs. Pell brought the rose down to the rail, held it level, and watched the star points shiver. The old captain had painted that star himself, black at its heart and green along its rays, and Pell had always said it looked more like a sea urchin than a bearing. Now he turned it slowly and found that the mustard ring lined up with the anchor chain hanging off the bow, which was the only thing on board that had never once lied.

They hauled the Mercy Jane round by the chain's bearing and raised the Lizard lighthouse before noon, exactly where the chart had insisted it would be. Pell never did fix the compass. He kept the brass rose in his waistcoat pocket, and whenever the galley argued about north he would simply open his hand and let the others look.