Colourful fine line tattoo of a compass rose and sailboat on the side of a ribcage, with a watercolour style orange sky and blue sea.

Compass rose and sailboat on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose with a black star-shaped centre and dotted rings sits behind a sailboat with pink and white sails on blue waves. Thin black linework outlines the compass and boat, while the sky and sea use soft orange, pink and blue wash shading. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against bare skin on the side of the torso.

Fine line Ribs Compass Compass rose Sailboat Sea Wave Sky Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The yacht's rudder had split on the Friday, and by Sunday the sea off Penzance had turned the colour of pewter, so Maud Trelawney sat hunched at the tiller with a bailing can between her boots and the compass swinging in its bowl. Her brother Joss had the sails, or he would have if his hands had stopped shaking. The needle wouldn't settle. It kept drifting north-west, then back, as if it had something on its mind.

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"Take the bearing off the old chart," she shouted over the wind. "The one in the oilskin tube, Joss. The star on it. Not the printed lines."

He fumbled the tube open and unrolled a sheet that had been folded so many times the compass rose had gone soft at the corners. The centre was a black eight-pointed star, and fine dotted rings ran out from it like ripples on a pond. Someone had sketched a little boat in the lower margin, pink sails, and beside it in pencil: Keep the sunset on your left hand.

So they did. The clouds over the headland had gone the colour of a peach, then rust, then the blue of the lamp in the harbour office, and Maud steered until the orange burned at her shoulder. By dusk the sea had flattened. Joss laughed, a wild helpless sound, and said the chart had been drawn by their grandmother, who had never once been further than Newlyn.

They made the slipway at Mousehole just as the lamps came on. Maud pinned the chart to the wall of the boathouse, and that winter she rowed out each evening to check that the sunset still fell where it should.