Traditional style map tattoo on the ribs with a compass rose, pink flowers, a skull and crossbones, a sea serpent and a dashed red route in colour and grey shading.

Compass rose and map tattoo on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large map-style tattoo covers the side of the torso over the ribs, with a central compass rose surrounded by pink flowers and green leaves. A skull and crossbones, a script quote, a sea serpent and a red X on a dashed red route sit around the design. The bold outlines and shaded grey land features are set against a warm tan skin tone, with a tattoo studio visible in the background.

Traditional Ribs Compass rose Map Flower Skull Crossbones Script Rose

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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

Mr Oakes wanted the serpent gone before the chart went to the engravers in London. He ran a thumb along the margin where it curled out of the grey shoals, neck arched like a question mark, and said underwriters did not insure against nonsense. Ada kept her eyes on the compass rose she was pricking out with a needle. Eight points, eight winds, and the pink roses she had tucked between north and east, because her mother had grown roses along the cliff path before the sea took the path.

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Her father had drawn the creature first, in the back of a log book, the winter the Mary Tregenna limped into Falmouth with her foremast gone and six men swearing the water had boiled green beside the hull. He never said what it was. He only drew it carefully, with one open eye and scales shaded in pencil. When he died Ada copied it onto every chart she made, because a sea without a monster in it looked like a sea nobody had sailed.

The red X on the dashed route marked where the Mary Tregenna had gone down with him aboard, though no one had ever found her. Oakes offered double the fee to have the beast removed. Ada said the chart was hers to draw and his to pay for, and that he could find another hand if he wanted the sea made tame. He did. The engraver in London kept the rose and the X and left the margin bare, and the chart sold well to men who wanted nothing strange on their maps.

That spring a Newlyn skipper came into the office with a sunburnt face and asked why the public chart showed nothing off the shoal. Ada took her own copy from the drawer, the one with the pencil still soft, and drew the serpent back in small on the corner beside the X. Then she blew the graphite clean and folded the sheet so the monster lay on the inside, where only someone who had come looking for it would find it.