Grey fine line compass rose tattoo with script letters N, E, S and W, placed on the ankle.

Compass rose on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits within a thin circle, with a star of eight points radiating from a solid centre dot. Script letters N, E, S and W mark the cardinal points. The linework is fine and the points are shaded in grey, with no colour ink.

Fine line Ankle Compass Compass rose Cardinal points Letter Star Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan kept the compass in the drawer under the gas bill, a brass one with the glass gone cloudy, and every Sunday she'd take it out and tell the lift it was going the wrong way. Nineteen floors up on Ashdown House, the lift always was going the wrong way, so she had a point. The needle in that little box had long since stopped agreeing with anything else in the flat.

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I was nine the summer she let me hold it out on the balcony. She pointed past the cranes at the gasworks and said that was north, the wind was south, and the sea was somewhere beyond the Co-op car park. If I walked far enough south with my eyes shut, she said, I would end up somewhere with oranges in the shop windows and nobody asking for my rent. I believed her for about a year. I drew the rose on the back of a Pools coupon so I'd always know which way to go, and I got the letters wrong three times before she took the pen off me and wrote them herself in that loopy hand of hers, N looping up like a bit of smoke.

I did go south, eventually. I went to Southampton with a rucksack and a bus pass and a coat with the lining torn. On the second night in a shared house off the Avenue I found the compass in the inside pocket, where I must have put it without thinking, the needle still pointing stubbornly at the top of the page.

I walked down to the docks in the rain and turned slowly until the S lined up with the ferry terminal. Then I walked back up the hill the way I'd come, because the needle had never once lied to me, and I wanted to tell Nan it had finally been right about something.