Black and white compass rose tattoo design with N, E, S and W labels and distressed linework, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a black compass rose with an eight-point star at its centre, set inside a ring of tick marks and a dotted outer circle. The cardinal points are labelled N, E, S and W, with long extended lines reaching outwards from the rose. The design is drawn in solid black ink with a worn, distressed texture, and it sits centred on a plain white background.

Traditional Compass Compass rose North South East West Star

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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

The rain had been coming off the canal since six, and by nine the stalls at Tenter Street were nothing but dripping canvas and men shouting prices they didn't mean. I was sheltering under the awning of Dolan's fruit crates, pretending to check my watch, when the old woman came round the corner pushing a pram full of brass instruments. Her name was Agnes Tulley and she had sold charts to my father for thirty years. She did not say hello. She just tipped the pram towards me and said, you're going the wrong way again.

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She unwrapped a flat tin from a tea towel. Inside was a compass rose, scratched and dull, the N and S worn almost smooth by somebody's thumb. Dad had carried it on the boat to Ostend and back, and then it had gone into a drawer and stayed there while he forgot which way the harbour lay. Agnes turned the needle with one finger. It shivered and settled on nothing useful. Eight points of black star, she said, and every one of them is a lie until you've stood on the ground it points at.

I asked what she wanted for it. She laughed, a short wet sound, and said the price was that I walk it to the east end of the basin myself, in this weather, and tell her at dawn which bridge the sun came up over. I said that was daft. She said my father had said the same thing, and then he had gone anyway.

I went. The rain thinned about two. At the east lock the water was the colour of pewter, and I stood with the tin open against my chest until the grey lifted and a thin gold line came across the basin, straight down the middle of everything, and I knew, for once, which way I was facing.