Black and grey compass rose tattoo design with shaded points and N, E, S and W labels, drawn on a tan sheet with 3 inch dimension lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose design on a 3 inch stencil sheet

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey compass rose design with an eight-pointed star at the centre, a ringed outer circle and N, E, S and W markers at the cardinal points. The points are shaded with solid black and grey fills, and fine radiating lines fill the inner area. It sits centred on a tan background within a dashed margin with dimension annotations, which suggests a sized stencil or print sheet.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Star Nautical Cardinal points

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Hollin Cross kept a brass compass in the drawer under his ticket punch, and nobody in the valley could remember him looking at it. Trains came in from the north and went out to the south, and the platform clock told everybody what they needed to know. Then the fog came down in October and stayed three weeks, and the clock stopped being any use to anyone.

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A girl called Ida Vell came to the ticket window with a stencil she had cut from a biscuit tin lid. She wanted a train that would take her somewhere the fog did not reach. The stationmaster studied the star she had traced, eight points spreading out from a ring, with the letters N, E, S and W set at the edges. He said the north point was the one that would always tell the truth, even when nothing else did. She asked him how he knew. He said he had walked that line for forty years and never once been lost on it.

He fetched the compass from the drawer and gave it to her. She laid it on the stencil and turned the needle until it settled on the N, then she walked out onto the platform with the damp grey air in her hair. The signal lamp went green behind her, and a train she had not been waiting for slid up out of the white.

Nobody at Hollin Cross saw her again. The stationmaster pinned her stencil above the window, and every October after, a new one appeared on the sill, cut from a different tin, always with the north point sharpest.