Black ink drawing of a compass rose with N, E, S and W letters above an anchor, shown on a plain white background as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose and anchor design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a compass rose with bold letters N, E, S and W marking the cardinal points. A ship's anchor sits below the rose, with its shaft running through the centre and its arms curving outwards. The linework is solid and uniform in black on white, with no shading or colour.

Traditional Compass Compass rose Anchor Nautical North South East West

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

Nobody on the ninth floor of Harrow Point believed the lift could go anywhere but up and down, so when Mrs Adeyemi's grandson said it had carried him out past the bins into open water, the others only nodded and asked him to press seven. He pressed the button marked R instead. The doors shut on the smell of wet concrete and opened on a grey sea that slapped against the parapet, with gulls turning over the car park as if it were a harbour.

Keep reading

Mr Bell on the fourth floor kept a brass compass in a biscuit tin, and he said the needle never lied, only the people who read it. He had sailed on the cargo boats out of Tilbury when he was young, and he told the children that an anchor holds a ship fast when the wind wants it gone. They dragged a rusted anchor up from the scrapyard behind the shops, one step at a time, and Mr Bell carried the lid of the tin under his arm like a chart.

On the roof the needle swung and settled, pointing south towards the car park and the bus stop where the buses no longer stopped. Mr Bell laughed and said that was the right direction, since everyone on the estate had come from the south in the first place. They dropped the anchor over the edge, and it struck the bins below with a clang that brought the whole block to its windows.

The next morning the lift worked as it always had, and the tin sat on the windowsill of the fourth floor, the needle still pointing south. On the ninth floor the grandson kept his trainers by the door, laces tied, in case the tide came in again before the bus did.