Pencil drawing of a compass rose inside a pocket watch case with ornamental scrollwork, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose in a pocket watch design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a compass rose with the cardinal points N, E, S and W and the intermediate points NE and NW marked. The compass sits inside a round case with a loop and chain at the top, and ornate scrolls curl around the lower edge. The design uses fine grey shading on white paper, and the composition is centred with the scrollwork framing the lower half.

Compass Compass rose Pocket watch Chain Scrollwork Cardinal points

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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

Sit down, and mind the cup, the table has been wet since the flood. You want the story of the watch? Then you must let me tell it my way, with the lamp turned low, because the guards on the far side can see a lit window from the ridge. The case on the table belonged to a surveyor named Ansel Pirrie, who walked the Hollin Gap for eleven summers measuring stones that seemed to shift in the night.

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He kept the compass under the glass in the lid, the north needle trembling as if it had heard something, and he swore it never lied to a man who knew how to read it. The scrolls round the bottom were not decoration, he said, but the sea that had once filled the valley, curling back off the rock. One October a guard named Dorrit stopped him at the hut and asked what he was carrying. Pirrie opened the case and showed her only the rose, the N and the E, and said the watch told him where he stood, not where he had come from.

Dorrit laughed and let him pass, then followed him up the scree in the dark. By morning the frost had sealed the path and the surveyor was gone, but his chain lay coiled on a flat stone, the watch face turned up, the needle pointing hard south toward the valley he had been forbidden to map. Dorrit kept the watch in her drawer for thirty years. Nobody ever asked her why she never once looked at the hour.