Small black and grey compass rose tattoo on the back of a hand, resting on a dark leather surface, with a ring on the adjacent finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose sits on the back of a hand, with eight-pointed star rays and an outlined circle drawn in solid black ink. The linework is bold and clean, with grey shading in the points giving the star some depth. The tattoo is centred in the frame against a dark leather background, with the hand and a plain metal ring visible.

Traditional Hand Compass Compass rose Star Nautical Hand

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada was still counting the swing chairs when the lorry pulled out of the field without her, its tail-lights swallowed by the fog that had rolled off the estuary at dusk. Behind her the fair stood dark: the carousel with its horses turned to the wall, the helter-skelter sagging under a tarpaulin, the fortune booth with its shutter down. She had a torch, a bag of spare bulbs and a brass compass that belonged to Mr Pryce, who ran the rides and never once let anyone else hold it.

Keep reading

She found the road by the smell of diesel and the sound of gulls. The needle swung north, then drifted east towards the water as if it had thought better of the first answer. Ada tapped the glass. Pryce had given it to her the week she was hired to mend the generator, and he had said a fair without a way home was only a field with noise in it.

A mile on, past a gate and a dripping hedge, she came into a lay-by where the lorry sat with its engine running and its headlights off. Pryce was leaning on the cab door, smoking, as though he had been there an hour and had not once looked at his watch. He did not ask where she had been. He held out a flask and said he had never trusted that compass either, not since it sent the dodgems into the marsh in 1987.

Ada climbed in beside him and set the brass case on the dashboard. The needle wavered, then settled, pointing straight through the windscreen at the shuttered fair they had just left, which was, she supposed, the one place on the whole coast that had always known where she belonged.