Compass rose and roses on a foot
Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo
A shaded grey compass rose sits inside an oval gold frame edged with dots, with cracked-looking lines across its face. Pink roses, green leaves, petals and a dark beaded chain wrap around the frame, outlined in bold black linework. Colour ink dominates, with soft pink wash around the flowers and the composition filling most of the foot.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The glass on Tom Ashdown's compass cracked the night the Mary Ellen came in too close to Gannet Rock. I was at the lamp when the signal went wrong, and I remember the sound the brass made when he dropped it on the iron stair, a small flat ring like a coin on a tray.
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He never replaced the glass. "The needle still knows north," he said, when I asked why he carried it with the crack running across the face like a river on a map. His mother had strung a chain of jet and river stones, and he hung it through the ring so it knocked softly against the frame whenever he climbed. Along the rim, the gilt dots had worn to the colour of old butter from his thumb.
The roses came later, after the Gannet was decommissioned and the boats no longer needed the light. Ruth, who kept the cottage garden at Saltcote, pressed a bloom from the wall every summer between the pages of the shipping log. When the petals finally dried to paper, she sent one to him in a letter, and he tucked it behind the brass hinge where no one would find it.
When I found the compass in his drawer after the funeral, the needle was still turning freely in its bowl. I held it to the window and watched the north point settle, cracked glass and all, the way it always had.
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