Black and grey dotwork compass mandala tattoo on a woman's upper chest beside the collarbone.

Compass mandala on upper chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits at the centre of a circular mandala, with radiating points, scrollwork and a ring of geometric patterning. The design uses fine linework and dense dotwork shading to give the circle and petals depth. It sits on the upper chest beside the collarbone, against a dark top and a dark background.

Dotwork Geometric Chest Compass Compass rose Mandala

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 cracked across its glass in the spring, so Mabel Orrin trusted it only as far as the noon shadow. The road out past Sallow Wells had no signposts, just a line of white stones that the wind kept shifting, and by the second day she could no longer tell which of them her father had laid himself. Her mule stopped twice to sniff at nothing. She kept the compass open on her knee the way he had taught her, lid up, the needle trembling like something alive.

Keep reading

The rose on its face had eight points, each tipped with a small iron arrow, and around them ran a ring of curling scrollwork that her grandmother called the sea's handwriting. Grandmother had never seen the sea, but she said it anyway. Mabel traced the scrolls with her thumb while the dust came up off the salt pan in a brown wall and swallowed the horizon whole.

When the wall passed, the stones were gone and so was the needle's patience. It swung east, then west, then back to the sun. She almost threw the thing into the sand. Instead she set it flat and turned it slowly until the shadow of the pin fell along the scrolls, and there, at the edge of the rose, was a notch she had never noticed, scratched by her father's knife years ago. She followed it to where the ground dipped and found the well, its rope gone grey, exactly where the old map promised.

She drank first, then let the mule drink, and only afterwards looked at the compass again. The needle had settled. It did not point north. It pointed back the way she had come, and she understood that this was the kindest thing a compass could say: that she was not lost, only standing somewhere the rose had not yet been drawn.