Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a shaded compass with an arrow, a scroll and a ribbon banner lettered with the word trouvaille.

Compass and arrow banner design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of a compass with a shaded face, north, east, south and west letters and a wind rose at its centre. An arrow passes behind the compass, a decorative scroll sits above it, and a banner lettered with the word trouvaille runs across the lower half. The shading is soft and graphite-toned on a cream sheet, with a pen and a marker visible in the corner.

Compass Compass rose Arrow Scroll Banner Ribbon Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Ramsgate could explain why Ada Pelling paid two shillings for a broken compass at the Saturday stall by the harbour, then carried it home wrapped in a tea towel as though it were a hen's egg. Her husband had sailed the Margate packet for thirty years and never once needed a needle to find his way home. She knew that. Still, the glass was cracked and the needle shivered towards the north like a dog hearing its name.

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She took it to Samuel Orme, who mended clocks above the chemist on Queen Street. He turned it over under his lamp, tutted at the foxed card and the worn pivot, then stopped at the small engraved arrow on the back that nobody had polished in a century. "Somebody marked this for finding things," he said, "not for keeping them."

That winter she walked the shingle each evening with the compass open in her palm. The needle kept drifting to one stretch of sand below the chalk, where the old lifeboat slip had washed away. On the fourth evening she dug with a trowel and then her bare fingers, and struck a tin box bent at the corners, full of letters in French. Every envelope was addressed to her grandmother, and none of them had ever been posted.

She read the first one aloud to the gulls, stumbling over the accents. It began with a single word, trouvaille, and she laughed until she had to sit down on the wet stones, the compass ticking shut in her hand.