Traditional-style flash drawing of a compass rose with two red roses and a banner reading Not All Who Wander Are Lost.

Compass and roses with banner design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a compass rose with black and white points and a grey dial, overlapped by two red roses with green leaves. Two scrolled banners carry the lettering Not All Who Wander Are Lost, in a blackletter-style script with red shading. Bold black outlines and flat fills sit on a pale cream background with a darker vignette around the edges.

Traditional Compass Compass rose Rose Banner North South East West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table was still wet from the night watch when Ada found the letter folded inside the almanac, the ink bled soft at the creases. Her grandfather had written it the winter the Marigold went down off the Skerries, though he never sent it, and she could tell from the pressure of his pen that he had been angry with himself rather than with the sea. He had drawn a compass rose in the margin, eight points sharp as gutting knives, and beside it two roses with their thorns left off, as if he could not bear to give them any harm.

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He wrote that the harbourmaster at Port Eyre had offered him a berth on the ferry and he had refused it, because a man who has steered by the stars cannot be trusted to stand still in a bay with a tea urn and a view of the breakwater. He wrote that the tide tables were a comfort but not a compass. A compass, he said, only tells you where the north is. It is the having of somewhere to go back to that gives the needle its meaning.

Ada folded the letter small and tucked it behind the brass plate of the chart drawer. Outside, the fishing boats were already grinding out past the lighthouse, their lamps going pale in the dawn. She took the Marigold's old bearing card down from its nail, the one with the blackened corners, and turned it over. On the back, in her own hand, she wrote the date and the words the Marigold's crew had carried down the harbour steps: the ones who roam are not the ones who are lost.