Black tribal-style compass rose design with a patterned ring and central flower motif, drawn on a parchment background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose design with tribal bands

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black compass rose with pointed star rays, sitting inside a ring of white triangle motifs. Dark bold shapes are filled with white tribal-style patterns, and a flower motif sits at the centre, with scrolled details at the top. The design is shown in black on a sepia parchment background.

Blackwork Geometric Compass Compass rose Star Nautical Tribal pattern Flower Mandala Ring

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

Shift your bottoms off that tent rope and sit proper, the lot of you, because I'm not telling this twice. Forty years back this fair pitched on a frozen field outside Hexham, and the ringmaster's wife, Dora Vane, kept a brass compass in her caravan drawer that nobody else was allowed to touch. It had a black star for a face, eight points with a ring of little white triangles round the rim like a row of teeth, and in the centre a flower cut into the metal. Her father had worked those tribal bands himself, by paraffin lamp, and he swore it pointed to wherever the fair would be happiest.

Keep reading

The trouble was it never once pointed north. Dora would shake it, lay it flat on the card table, and the needle would swing round to whichever town had a lost purse or a lonely widow in it. She followed it anyway. One wet October the needle swung west, toward the mill village of Cragg, where the owner's boy had gone missing in the cold. Dora harnessed the ponies and drove through the night, and found him sitting on a stile, eating a cold potato and wondering whether anybody would bother to come looking.

He said he'd only come to see the lights. Dora didn't scold him. She sat down beside him on that stile, took out the compass, and asked where he wanted to go. He said he didn't know. So she let him hold it, and the needle trembled and stopped, and for once it pointed straight at the boy himself.

They say that boy grew up to run his father's mill, and every spring he sends a wagon of coal to the Vane lot without a word on the docket. And the compass? Some say it still hangs in Cragg church. Me, I reckon it's sitting in the cupboard by the door, right where you're all leaning on it.