Two bare feet with a teal and black traditional anchor tattoo wrapped in rope on the left foot and a teal compass rose on the right foot.

Anchor and compass rose tattoos on both feet

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

Two bare feet are shown side by side, each with a tattoo on the top of the foot. The left foot has an anchor with rope wrapped around the shank, set in front of a ship's wheel with radiating lines and dots. The right foot has a compass rose with the letters N, E, S and W, both in bold outlines with teal and blue shading. The image is well lit against a dark background, with green painted toenails visible.

Traditional Other Anchor Rope Ship wheel Compass rose Compass Nautical Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Osric Vane came down the Harrow Pass on the ninth day of the snow with one mule, a coil of wet rope and his grandmother's brass compass. The carriers waiting at Lowgate inn took the five missing mules for an omen and said so. Osric said nothing. He sat by the fire with his boots steaming and turned the compass over on the table, watching the needle shiver and settle, always towards the same notch in the hills.

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Cloud had come down on the high ground, and the rest of the party had turned back at the thunder of a slide. Osric kept walking the way the needle pointed. At the lip of a gully he found a rusted anchor fluke wedged between two boulders, some flood's leavings from a sea he had never seen. He knotted his rope around its shank, went over the drop hand over hand, and cursed the brass for a liar when the snow blinded him.

The needle did not lie. When the cloud tore open he saw the glimmer of the inn's lamp far below, and the bell at Lowgate was ringing for the lost, which he had always thought a foolish custom until that night. He reached the door with frostbitten fingers and the rope still looped over his shoulder.

He hung the compass above the hearth that spring. The carriers could not read the letters on its face, but they learned to coil their rope beside the door before every crossing. The old needle is still there, its north letter worn to a smudge, and nobody at Lowgate sends a mule up the pass without a lamp left burning in the window.