Black and grey realism tattoo of a compass rose inside a baroque scroll frame on the side of the torso.

Compass rose in an ornate scroll frame

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed compass rose sits at the centre of a symmetrical frame of baroque scrollwork and acanthus-style leaves. The compass ring and dial are shaded with smooth grey gradients and dark, sharp points, giving the centre a dimensional, lifelike quality. The ornamental frame is shaded in soft greys and black, and the design fills most of the photograph against a plain skin background.

Realism Other Compass Compass rose Ornate frame Scrollwork Acanthus Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread had gone hard in the locker again, and the cook's mate blamed the damp, the way he blamed everything from the Bay of Biscay onward. You scraped the grey fur off a heel of loaf with your thumbnail and listened to the pumps thudding somewhere below the deck plates. The galley smelled of tallow and wet wool. Beyond the porthole the Atlantic was the colour of old pewter, and the ship had been rolling for three days without letting up.

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Quartermaster Hale came in with the slate under his arm and asked whether the binnacle card still swung true. You said it did, because you had checked it at the change of watch, though you had not mentioned that you had polished the glass with your sleeve and held the brass case in both hands like a lamp. The card hung in the chart room in a frame of carved acanthus leaves, the gilt worn to bare wood at the corners. A purser had bought it in Lisbon for a price nobody aboard would name. Every man who passed touched the glass, as if luck lived in the rose at its centre.

Hale tapped the slate. The card had drifted a point east since Madeira, he said, and the rose's north had a chip in it that could be read two ways. You had re-soldered that chip yourself during the middle watch, with a sliver of tin and a candle stub, and you were no longer sure which way you had set it. He asked you plainly which way was north now. You looked at the spray on the window and the grey light behind it, and you tapped the glass the way the others did.

"North is where we are going," you said, and he laughed and went out. You put the heel of bread in the pot to soften for the men's supper and watched the water rise around it, pale and slow, the way a tide finds its own level.