Traditional style tattoo of a compass rose and open pocket watch with red roses, green leaves and rope edging on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and roses in traditional style

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of a grey compass face, flanked by an open pocket watch with rope edging on the right and a coiled rope loop on the left. Red roses and green leaves frame the design, with heavy black outlines and solid fills. Bold reds, oranges, greens and blues sit against black and grey shading on a light skin tone.

Traditional Upper arm Compass Compass rose Rose Rope Pocket watch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, lad, it smokes when the hatch is shut. Aye, that's the compass you've been staring at since Madeira. Made in Bristol by a man called Abel Ferrars, who swore the needle was true even when the ship's bell was cracked. Took it off a drowned purser in the Bay of Biscay, and I've kept it wound ever since, though the watch inside it stopped the night we lost the foremast.

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The rose on the card was painted red, and that was my wife's doing. She'd dabbed the petals with a cochineal she'd bought from a Lisbon widow, and every time the captain asked why we steered by a flower, I told him the flower was the one thing on board that never lied about north. He laughed at me the whole way to Cape Horn. He stopped laughing when the fog came down thick as wet wool and the lead line showed nothing but deeper water.

We found the land by the rope. Not the coil on the wheel, mind, but the frayed end that had worked loose from the lid of the old pocket watch and hung down over the chart table like a hangman's cord. When the swell pulled it sideways it pointed the same way as the needle, and I swear to you that rope was the only honest thing aboard that night. We followed it into a bay with three black rocks and one green light, and the captain never once asked about the flower again.