Black ink drawing of a geometric compass rose with a lotus-like centre, flanked by the letters N, E, S and W, with the quote Listen to your inner compass running up the page.

Compass rose design with inner compass quote

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an eight-pointed compass rose built from petal-like shapes around a central star, set inside a dotted circular ring. Compass letters N, E, S and W mark the four points, and the handwritten phrases Listen to your inner compass and Let it guide you run vertically above and below the design. The linework is solid black on a pale background with no shading, and the composition is symmetrical and centred.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Star Mandala Quote Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last good map we owned was painted on the lid of Dad's props trunk, a compass rose with its eight points picked out in gold leaf that had long since flaked onto the sawdust. Nobody read it anymore. We had a cracked phone propped on the tuba case, and it told us Doncaster when we wanted Doncaster and sulked somewhere in the Peaks when we wanted anywhere at all.

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By October the takings had shrunk to the price of diesel. Mum sold the elephant's blanket, then the brass band's music stands. Dad sat on the wagon steps every evening with the old tin compass he'd carried since the Navy, tapping its glass as if the needle might change its mind. 'Listen to your inner compass,' he said, the way he'd said it to every new lad who joined us, and he laughed at himself, because none of us had ever listened to anything but the bookings.

The night we lost the lane to Carlisle, the phone gave up completely. We pulled onto a verge at the edge of a ploughed field with the generator coughing. Dad flipped open the tin compass, and the needle swung and settled. 'North is that way, love,' he said, 'and so is everything we used to be.' Then he started walking, the rest of us trailing after him with lamps.

We reached a ridge at first light where a farmer's barn had a flat roof and enough room for a ring of sawdust. Dad hammered the last peg into the field with the heel of his boot. We put up nothing that morning. We just sat in a row on the trunk lid, Mum, the lads and me, and watched the sun come up exactly where the compass said it would, which was more than any booking had ever managed.