Black line flash sheet of six compass designs, including a dreamcatcher compass, a feathered arrow compass and a compass with a small swallow, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass designs flash sheet

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows six separate compass designs on a white background, from ornate compass roses with eight-point stars to simpler cross-shaped compasses with N, E, S and W labels. Linework is fine and mostly uniform, with some areas of dotted and hatched shading in the rose centres and feathers. The designs are drawn in black ink only and are arranged in a loose grid with even spacing.

Fine line Geometric Compass Compass rose Dreamcatcher Feather Arrow Star Swallow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Quill had been walking the curtain wall for an hour before she admitted the compass was lying. The brass needle swung west each time she turned her back on the gatehouse, and the dead ivy on the north tower seemed to agree with it. Her brother had sworn the rose was true when he sold it to her, its eight points scratched into the lid the same way the old survey stones at Thornbeck were marked.

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She pulled the feather from the cord at her wrist and held it against the stone. Feathers did not lie, her grandmother used to say, though she had never said which way they pointed. The swallow on the lid, its wings cut into the edge of the N, had always looked as if it was leaving. Now Mara wondered whether the castle was the thing leaving, its outer ward sinking a little more every spring into the bog.

By dusk she had marked the stones with chalk: a cross, an arrow, a small dotted circle where the chapel had been. Nothing agreed with anything. Then the low light came across the keep and threw the shadow of the broken portcullis straight down the slope to the river, and she understood the needle had never been wrong. It had been pointing at the one thing the castle had always faced, the water, and the mapmakers had simply drawn the wrong side of the hill.

She packed the compass into her coat and left the chalk where it lay. Whoever came after her could decide which way was north.