Hand-drawn tattoo design of a compass with pink flowers, leaves and a scroll banner reading Take Me Home, shaded in grey with coloured pencil accents.

Compass and flowers with Take Me Home banner

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a compass rose set within a gold-rimmed dial, framed by pink and purple flowers, teal leaves and a grey ribbon banner lettered with the words Take Me Home. The compass face and banner are shaded in soft greys, with a row of beads trailing from the top and sides. Pink, purple, blue and yellow coloured pencil highlights the flowers, leaves and rim against the grey shading.

Neo-trad Lettering Compass Flower Leaves Banner Lettering Bead Rose

Find an artist for this

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 had sat in the lost property cupboard on Ward Four for so long that nobody could say who had left it there, and when the night sister, Hetty Crane, finally took it out to ask the porters, they only shrugged and said it had always been there, like the damp.

Keep reading

It was a plain thing, a round face under scratched glass with the letters worn off the rim, and the needle did not settle north. It swung towards the corridor window, then the bed bays, then the fire door, as if it had been asked a question and was still thinking about it. Old Walter Pike in bed six told her, the week before his last sleep, that such a compass only worked for people who knew where they were going. His mother had carried one in the Dales, he said, and she walked to the end of the lane each evening with it to find her way back from chapel.

On the third night of the frost, Walter's grandson came in from the car park with his coat buttoned wrong and asked for the old man by name. Walter was awake, thin as a rake handle, his eyes still clear. Hetty put the compass in his palm. He turned it slowly and laughed, a sound like a dry leaf, and said the needle was pointing at the kitchen.

By the time the milk trolley came round, Walter had gone quietly in his sleep with the compass closed in his hand, the needle pointing at the window where the first grey light was coming up over the hills. Hetty wrote nothing about it in the log. She kept the compass in her apron pocket for the rest of her shifts, and on the nights she felt lost she checked it and walked on.