Black compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on a man's shoulder and upper arm, shown in traditional style.

Compass rose on a shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black compass rose with an eight-point star sits inside a ring of short tick marks, with the letters N, W, S and a partly visible E placed at the cardinal points. The solid black ink and clean lines are set against pale, freckled skin, and the tattoo is framed close, with the shoulder and upper arm filling most of the shot.

Traditional Shoulder Upper arm Compass Compass rose Star Letter Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boundary stone had vanished under a fortnight of snow, and the survey sheet in my hands put it exactly where a pencil cross said it should be, which was no use to anyone standing on a hillside at four in the afternoon. Across the drift, the customs man on the far side was swinging a torch in slow arcs, waiting for me to stop being foolish and walk in.

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Tomasz had drawn the compass rose in the margin of that sheet thirty years ago, when his hands were still steady enough for ink. Eight points, the long ones inked solid, and a ring of short ticks he had counted out by hand with the tip of a pin. Nobody takes a border on faith, he used to say, tapping the N until the paper dented. I thought he was being fussy. I took the sheet out of his drawer the week after the funeral and carried it up here because it was the only map that had ever got him home.

I stood with my back to the wind and let the rose settle the question. The south arm pointed down the slope, past the wall, towards a dip where the ground fell away. I counted the ticks as I walked, one for each pace he had written beside them in his cramped capitals, and at forty-one the snow gave a hollow sound under my boot. I knelt and swept it aside with my glove. The granite cap was there, chipped on one corner, the carved mark still sharp.

When I looked up, the torch had stopped swinging. I folded the sheet and put it back in my coat with the N facing the stone, as he would have wanted, and walked the last yards across the line.