Black ink compass rose tattoo with ornate N, E, S and W letters on the ankle, above a cream slip-on shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on the ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits on the side of an ankle, with an eight-pointed star inside a double-ringed circle and ornate letters marking the four compass points. The linework is clean and even, with solid black fills on the star points and dotted detail on the inner ring. The design is shown against cream canvas shoes and the hem of blue denim, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Traditional Ankle Compass Compass rose Star Letter Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had stopped swinging the winter Tom went out past the Skerry, and Mags Ledingham would not let anyone take it down from the lamp room wall. Dust settled on its glass. Every evening she wiped the face with the hem of her apron and read it the way other women read the paper, the needle fixed on a north that was no use to anyone.

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The rose on the chart table was older than the electric lamp the board had fitted in the spring. Someone had inked it in the 1880s: eight rays of a star inside two rings, the letters curling at the four points like ferns uncurling. Tom used to trace it with a pencil while the kettle boiled, telling her a man could find his way home from any spot on that paper if he knew which way the star was pointing. She only knew where it pointed now, back toward the water.

On the sixth night of the gale the fog came in thick as wool, and the new lamp threw its beam into it and got nothing back. Mags climbed the iron stairs with the old paraffin lantern, set it on the rail, and swung it slowly through the eight points, north to north-east and round again, until a shape lurched out of the murk, a dark hull riding the swell toward the rocks.

The boat came in on the next surge, Tom at the tiller, his face grey with salt. He stepped onto the landing and looked up at the light. "Your lamp's dead," he said. "No," she called down, "I was only telling you where the rocks are." Behind her, on the wall, the brass needle gave a small shiver and swung, at last, toward the landing where he stood.