Black and grey pencil drawing of a steampunk style compass with a flower centre, gear details, feathers and beaded chains, drawn as a tattoo design.

Compass and dreamcatcher design in pencil

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a stylised compass with a flower-like star at its centre, surrounded by a ring, gear teeth and a ladder-like arc on each side. Beaded chains hang from the compass to a smaller dreamcatcher-style circle with a flower pattern, and two feathers dangle from the base. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, built up with cross-hatching on the metallic pieces, and the design is composed vertically on a plain white background.

Fine line Botanical Geometric Compass Flower Gear Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Arc Star

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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

The brass compass has been stuck at north-west since before you arrived, and Brother Anselm will not let you open it. Lift the glass and you only let the damp in, he says, and the damp has done enough. Each morning you carry the ledger up the bell-stair to the clock room, where the great wheels turn with a sound like someone counting under their breath, and you wind the escapement while snow piles against the shutters.

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The clock has a gear missing. Anselm dug it from the mud of the lower cloister the year the river flooded, a toothed wheel no bigger than a coin, and he never replaced it, saying the hours have learned to keep time without it. You ask how a clock can be right with a gap in it. He sets a grey feather on the bench, plucked from a dove that roosts in the eaves, and says the gap is where the wind gets in, and that a monk's work is to listen at it.

In March the hunters' road is closed, and a stranger comes to the gate with a bundle of ash hoops strung with thread and beads. Anselm turns it over and asks whether you know what it is for. You say catching dreams. He says it is for catching the bell's voice so the valley can hear it at night. You do not believe him, but when he hangs it in the clock room the compass needle shudders, swings, and settles, steady, on the small window where the frost is melting.

Anselm dies before the thaw and you keep the clock. At last you prise open the compass, and the needle still points west, towards the sea he never let you visit. You leave it so. Some mornings you wind the wheels and count the gap aloud, one tick and then the empty place, and the house keeps time around it.