Black and grey compass rose tattoo on the palm of a hand, with muted purple map shading and a sprig of branches at the wrist.

Compass rose and map shading on a palm

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with a star-shaped needle and small stars sits at the centre of the palm, with the coordinates 47°55 N 106°55 E written below it. Fine linework and soft grey and purple-toned shading suggest landmasses and birds around the compass, and a branching botanical tattoo runs down toward the wrist. The ink is dark and crisp against the skin, and the composition centres the compass with the hand held open towards the camera.

Botanical Geometric Hand Compass Compass rose Star Map Bird Coordinates Branches Tree Script

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 snow had been falling since the feast of Saint Brannoc, and by the third night the road below the inn at Sorrel Gap had vanished, so when the stranger knocked I was already reaching for the bolt with my mind on the soup. He stood in the doorway with a brass compass open on his palm, its needle trembling as though it had been asked a question it did not care for. "It keeps pointing at your chimney," he said. "I have walked three days by this and it has never once lied to me, and now it says I am already home."

Keep reading

I took him in, because nobody sensible turns away a man with frost in his eyebrows. He ate my barley and said little, but while the fire chewed through the logs he drew on the back of an old bill of fare with a stub of charcoal. Birds, he drew, flocks of them going south in a long ragged hook, and beside them a coastline that appeared in no atlas my father kept behind the bar. Under the compass rose he wrote two numbers, crossed them out, then wrote them again, a fraction different.

On the fourth morning the sky cleared like a slammed shutter and the road came back, white and glaring. He paid in silver that had clearly travelled a long way and set off with the compass held flat before him. I watched from the step until his dark shape was a stitch in the snow. Then I went to the bar and found the bill of fare, and beneath his drawing, in my father's careful hand, were the same two numbers, written on the same page twenty-six winters before, with a note that read only: she will come back when the cranes do not. I looked up at the compass hung by the door, the one that had never once been wrong, and saw its needle swing slowly round to point at the stranger's footprints.