Pencil sketch of a compass design with skis running north to south, crossed ski poles on the diagonals and mountain peaks across east and west, with N, E, S and W lettering.

Compass design with skis, poles and mountains

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on spiral-bound paper shows a compass rose built from a pair of skis pointing north and south, with crossed ski poles on the diagonals and a row of mountain peaks running east to west. The letters N, E, S and W sit at the cardinal points in a script-like hand. The linework is light and sketchy with soft shading on the mountains and skis, and the composition is centred and symmetrical on a plain off-white page.

Compass Mountain Compass rose Letter Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewe had gone up past the old sheepfold the night the wind swung round to the north, and by the time Dad's boots found the lane it was already dark enough that the torch made no difference. He handed me the long skis with the cracked tips, the pair he kept in the byre for exactly this, and said the compass was in my coat where it always was.

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Mum had bought the compass at a market the year before the bad winter, and the glass still had a hairline crack across the N. I set the bezel the way she taught me, red needle inside the arrow, and pushed off along the drystone wall. The snow was crusted and loud under the skis. Every few hundred yards the ridge showed black against the grey, peaks lined up like a row of broken teeth, and I kept them on my left so I would not drift east into the bog.

I found her in a hollow below the crags at first light, standing with her back to the wind and a dusting of snow along her spine like sugar on a loaf. She did not run. She only watched me come down the slope with the poles planted either side of her, crossed in the snow as if someone had laid them there on purpose. I looped the rope round her neck, and she walked behind me all the way south along our own tracks, placing her feet in the grooves my skis had left.

At the gate Dad was waiting with the kettle steaming on the step. He looked at the ewe, then at the skis, then at the compass in my hand, which I had not needed once since the ridge. 'Took you long enough,' he said, and hung the compass back on its nail beside the door, where the needle, for once, had nowhere to point but home.