Three-stage tattoo design of a pocket compass with a butterfly across the dial, shown as line art, greyscale shading and full colour.

Compass and butterfly design in three stages

Mixed · Flash

A pocket compass with a butterfly across its dial, shown with a chain hanging from the top, in three panels from left to right. The first panel is clean black line art, the second is greyscale with soft shading and highlights, and the third adds blue and teal colour to the butterfly wings. The compass points, degree numbers and compass directions are drawn in detail on a plain white background.

Compass Butterfly Pocket watch Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tovah Mireille had kept the brass compass since her grandmother's death on the Long Shelf, where the ice came down to the sea. Nobody on the shelf trusted the north any more. The magnets had wandered, the stars had gone thin with smoke from the hill-towns, and the old men said the needle lied after dark. Tovah did not argue. She only wound the chain twice round her wrist and walked.

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Her path ran through the grey country of the drowned orchards, where every road had a name and none of the names matched a sign. At the Ninety Crossing she stopped, opened the lid, and watched the needle swing and settle on nothing she could see. Degrees were written round its face in tiny numerals, three hundred and twenty, two hundred and forty, and a moth-winged shape lay across the dial with its body on the north line. Her grandmother had said the moth was a sort of pilot. You followed where it looked.

Tovah turned slowly until the wings lay flat against the road ahead. Then she walked. Forty paces, a broken gate, a well with a bird's nest in its bucket. Behind her the sky over the shelf had gone the colour of pewter.

At the well she opened the lid again and saw the wings had changed, a faint teal running through the grey like light through shallow water. She had heard that colour came back only to those who arrived. She stood a while with the chain cold in her palm, then went on toward the lamp in the valley, counting her steps the old way, because the moth had led her home and she had never once looked back.