Black geometric compass rose with an arrow motif tattooed down the centre of a woman's upper back, seen from behind by a waterfall.

Compass and arrow on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her hair in a loose bun and sunglasses on her head, shows a black compass rose tattoo centred on her upper back. The compass has a ringed centre, radiating spokes and a fringe of short points, with a stacked diamond and arrowhead shape extending upward and downward along the spine. The ink is solid black with fine outlines, set against bare skin, a bikini top and a waterfall and woodland backdrop.

Geometric Back Compass Arrow Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last surveyor of Corrow Vale had been dead eleven winters, and the guild in Marrowgate still would not let anyone touch his brass compass. Ysolde Fenn, apprenticed there since she was twelve, asked the clerk why. He slid the instrument across the oak table with two fingers, as though it might bite, and said the needle had never settled for anyone but the man who owned it.

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She carried it out to the eastern weir, where the river poured over the ledge in a white sheet that drowned every other sound. The rose was sixteen points of black ink, a ring for the fixed stars, a fringe of short teeth around the edge. Below it, the arrow ran down the spine of the case in stacked diamonds, each one smaller than the last, until the point touched the mud. She turned the compass slowly on her palm. The needle swung toward the water every time, and every time it came back to the same bend in the river.

For three days she followed that bend upstream, counting bridges and sleeping in barns that charged her in eggs. At the head of the gorge she found a cairn with a tin box under the third stone. Inside lay the surveyor's ledger, and on the last page, in cramped capitals: THE NEEDLE POINTS WHERE I HAVE STOPPED LYING TO MYSELF. FOLLOW THE ARROW, NOT THE RING.

She sat on the cairn a long while, then walked back down the river with the box under her arm. At the weir she set the compass on the flat ledge, and the needle, for once, stopped trembling. It pointed downstream, past the mill and the chapel and the guild's grey windows, straight to the lamp she had left burning on her own desk.