Black ink tattoo of a compass rose within a mandala pattern near the upper back, with a fine-line arrow and feather fletching running down the spine, shown in three photos.

Compass and arrow down the back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits within an ornate mandala-style border at the top of the upper back, with a long arrow below it that runs down the spine and ends in a feathered fletching. The compass uses bold solid black points, while the surrounding mandala and the arrow are drawn in finer black outlines with stippled dashes. The image is a collage of three close photographs in black ink only, with no colour.

Geometric Fine line Back Compass Mandala Star Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass rose on the forward bulkhead had been lying for eleven years, and Ilse Varga still squared her boots to it before the shift bell. Nobody on the Tamsin Reach had the heart to repaint it. The bold points were scorched black by the old vents, and the fine ring around them, all those scalloped petals and dotted stitches, had been drawn by a surveyor who thought a ship's course should look like lace.

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The arrow ran aft from the rose along the main corridor, a thin line of luminous paint ending in its feathered tail at the reactor hatch. Ilse had walked it a thousand times. Each feather carried a burn record, and the little dots along the shaft marked the burns nobody had logged. Her mother said the arrow showed where they were going. Her grandmother said it showed where they were falling, which on a ship that never stopped came to the same thing.

The trouble began when the navigation board flagged four degrees of drift. Ilse spent a night with the star charts spread across the galley table, following the arrow past the dead moons to the grey smudge the founders had labelled Home. It did not point at Home. It pointed at a gap between two stars where, by her sums, nothing waited at all. Her tea went cold beside her elbow while she sat with that.

At the bell she went to the bulkhead and did not touch the instruments. With chalk from her pocket she drew a second arrow between the scalloped petals, pointing back the way they had come, and gave it no feathers. It was only a shaft. Then she squared her boots and went to work, because the ship still needed feeding and the falling was not finished yet.