Pen drawing of an atom with orbiting planets set over a compass rose marked N, E, S and W, shown on paper rather than skin.

Atom and compass rose design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of an atom with a shaded nucleus and several elliptical orbits, each with small planet-like circles, centred on a compass rose with N, E, S and W points. The linework is dark and even, with light stippling and hatching in the nucleus and some of the orbiting spheres. The design is drawn in black ink on pale paper, with the compass arms extending across the full composition.

Orbit Planet Compass Compass rose Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle would not settle, so Hester Mabry took the compass apart on the kitchen table and laid its brass pieces out in a row. The north card had come loose from its pin. She fitted it back with a bent hairpin while her brother read aloud from a journal he had borrowed from the vicar and not yet returned, something about rings of small bodies turning around a dense heart too tiny to see.

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Walter did not believe a word of it. "If the middle is that small," he said, "what keeps anything going round it? Nothing but a wish." Hester pressed the card flat and said the planets had managed without wishes for longer than the parish had kept its registers. He laughed, then stopped, because the needle had swung, trembled, and pointed past the window at the grey water.

They took the pilchard boat out at slack tide with the compass wrapped in oilcloth against her chest. Walter rowed. Hester watched the card and called the bearings, north by east, north, north by west, and the little arrow she had engraved on the south point the winter before kept its head toward the harbour wall, as though it remembered something they had forgotten.

They were back before the tide turned. Walter never raised the rings again, but he began sitting up with the journal in the evenings, turning its pages slowly. Once Hester found a pencilled ring tucked inside the lid of the compass box, each small sphere labelled with a name she did not know.