Black and grey pencil and ink drawing of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis on top and scrolls and dots around it, a tattoo design sheet.

Compass rose design with fleur-de-lis

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a compass rose, with long pointed star rays, a ringed dial with tick marks, and a central hub. A fleur-de-lis sits at the top and curling scrollwork with dots surrounds the outer edge. The linework is dark and the shading is soft grey pencil on a pale background, with a clean, centred composition.

Traditional Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Scroll Dot

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

The chart shop on Fenwick Lane had no sign, only a brass compass rose screwed beside the door, and Mrs Odetta Crane sold maps there out of a cabinet that smelled of camphor and wet wool. I was fourteen and had been sent to fetch a replacement sheet of the Solent for my uncle's boat. She didn't look up from her ledger. She asked me which way the north was in my head, and when I pointed, she laughed and said that was the first honest answer anyone had given her all month.

Keep reading

She kept her compass roses in a flat drawer, each one hand-inked on card, and she let me sit at the counter with the drawer open while the rain came down the shopfront in sheets. The fleur-de-lis at the top of her favourite one, she told me, was a French habit, a mark of the pilots who charted the Channel before the English had bothered to. The ring of tick marks around the dial was for the people who needed to know how far, not just where. The dots and curling scroll on the outside were, she said, the bits that let you breathe, the flourish a cartographer adds so the sea doesn't look too empty.

When my uncle's boat went down off Hurst in the autumn, the sheet I had carried home was still folded in the chart table, dry as paper ever stays. I took it to Mrs Crane, who had shut her shop for the funeral and opened it again the next morning. She unfolded the Solent on the counter, traced the line of the tide with one finger, and then slid a new card across to me. It was a rose with the hub left blank. Write your own north, she said, and I did, in pencil, and I have never once got it wrong since.