Pencil drawing of a compass rose with an arrow pointing north east, labelled W, E and S, shown on a sheet of paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose design drawn on paper

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on white paper of a detailed compass rose with an arrow running diagonally through the centre, with the letters W, E and S marked around it. The linework is fine and the star points and compass circle are shaded with cross-hatching and stippling. The design is shown flat and centred on the sheet, with no body part visible.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Arrow Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table in the back of the *Mercy Lind* had a brass fitting that never sat level, so every entry Hanne Oorlog made was written with the book tilted against her knee. Eleven days out from Tromsø and the wind had gone round to the west and stayed there, pushing them south of their line. She marked the rose on the paper before she touched the dividers: eight points, the long spike of the north pointing at the cabin door, the cross-hatching thickening where the shadow of the mainsail fell across the chart at noon.

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The arrow was the second mate's idea. Piet had carved it from a broken spar and tucked it under the bench, and he said a true bearing was worth nothing if you did not also know which way you were being carried. When the fog came down on the twelfth morning, Hanne laid the arrow along the course they had sailed and found the sun was a grey smear to the east, exactly where the stippled point of the south star should have been.

She wrote the correction in pencil, not ink, because pencil could be rubbed out and she intended to be wrong about nothing. Then she took the brass lamp down from its hook, lit it, and held it over the rose until the letters W, E and S threw small shadows across the table. By the afternoon the cloud broke over a low black island with one white beacon, and she steered for it without looking back at the needle.