Small black fine line compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the heel of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on a heel

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose with arrowed points and the letters N, E, S and W sits on the heel of a bare foot. The linework is thin and even, with a dotted inner ring and short tick marks around the central circle. The tattoo is solid black on pale skin, set against a plain white fabric background.

Fine line Other Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Arrow Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce had the brass plate on the bench before the kettle boiled, and he was already tutting at the E. Too heavy in the middle, Ada. A sailor will read it like a sausage. She took the graver from its velvet roll, set the point against the metal the way her father had taught her, and told herself the letter was fine. Outside, the tide was grinding against the harbour wall, and up the hill the Marigold's bell was being rung for the last time before she sailed for Riga.

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The rose was the hard part. Eight arrowed points, a central circle no wider than a shilling, and between the points the short ticks that the old Whitby men cut to mark the half winds, though nobody in the office could agree on how many there ought to be. Ada cut them all the same, one neat stroke at a time, then dotted the inner ring with the punch until her wrist ached. Pryce wanted a chart table that would outlast them both. She wanted, privately, something no one would look at twice.

That night she came back alone with a lamp and a stub of pencil. Under the plate's lower edge, where the ticks crowded the south arrow, she cut her initials so small that a glass was needed to find them, then rubbed the burr flat with her thumb so no one would feel it. Nobody checked the plates that closely. Nobody, she thought, had ever needed to.

Eleven weeks later the Marigold came back over the bar with her mainsail in ribbons. The mate carried the brass rose down to the shop in a wrapped cloth, its edges scuffed from a blow off Heligoland. He said the captain had kept it screwed to the wheelhouse bulkhead and had steered by it every night. Ada turned the plate under the lamp, found her initials hiding among the dots, and said nothing at all.