Black ink drawing of a geometric compass rose with a mandala-style centre and cursive N, E, S and W markings, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose design drawn on paper

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn compass rose sits centrally on a sheet of paper, with an eight-pointed star made of long pointed petals over a layered mandala pattern. The cursive letters N, E, S and W mark the cardinal points, and small dots sit between the points at the outer edge. The linework is black and fine, with shading only in the inner rings, and the composition is symmetrical with plenty of empty paper around it.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Mandala Star Dot Cardinal points

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

Ila Brannock had drawn the same compass rose for nineteen years, on the back of every chart she sold to the ferry men on Scarra. She never used a stencil. Her husband had taught her to start at the north point with the cursive N, because a rose begun from the top came out level, he said, and one begun sideways never forgave you.

Keep reading

The morning the Mairi Ann failed to round the skerries, she was at the kitchen table with a fresh sheet and a fine nib, shading the inner rings the way Tom liked, one small curl at a time. The coastguard man had left his cap on the chair and she had not moved it. Tom called the dots between the points the stops, the places where a man checks his bearing before he commits to a course. She counted them out, eight on the outer ring, then sixteen, and found she had drawn one more than the design needed.

She sat with that extra dot for an hour. Then she took the nib to the east letter, the E with its tail curling back like a sail, and wrote a second one beside it, small, the way Tom signed the margins of his tide tables. It was not a mistake. It was a place for him to be reckoned from.

At dusk she pinned the sheet to the window where the harbour light would fall across it. The points lay true against the glass. She set the brass compass from his coat on the paper and waited, and the needle swung, shivered, and came to rest pointing at the door she had left open for the wind.