Blue ink drawing of a geometric compass rose mandala on paper, held up by a hand against a plain wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose mandala drawing

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A compass rose with a central eight-pointed star is drawn in blue ink, with the letters N, E, S and W at the cardinal points. Concentric rings of scalloped petals, dotted and hatched bands and a floral medallion fill the centre, all in fine, even linework. The drawing fills most of a sheet of paper held up by a hand, with a fire extinguisher visible on the wall behind.

Geometric Compass rose Compass Mandala Star Floral Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stamp jammed on the third form, so I sat back with the ink pad and let the queue think about it. Beyond the glass, the red extinguisher on its bracket had been painted over so many times that its nozzle looked like a cork. My father gave me his old marine compass the year I passed the exam, and it lived in my top drawer beside the rubber bands and the spare biros.

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On slow afternoons I drew compass roses on the blank backs of spare forms, because my hands needed something that did not have to be right. Mostly I got the petals wrong. Each rose took me the best part of an hour, all those scalloped rings and dotted bands, the little hatched seams where the points met. When one was finished I pinned it above the desk so nobody could say I had wasted the shift.

At twenty to five a lorry driver called Dariusz leaned into the window with the fog behind him. The signboards on the far side had been stolen or blown away, he said, and he could not tell which road led back to the motorway. I took the sheet down from its pin and turned it so the N sat at the top, the way it should. He looked at the eight-pointed star for a long time, then at the wall, then at me.

"Keep it," I said, and slid it under the glass with his papers. He folded it once and tucked it behind the visor. When his lights swung north along the dark road, the drawing was the last clear thing I saw of him.