Faded compass rose tattoo with cardinal letters on the back of a person's neck, shown in light grey ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A faded compass rose with an eight-point star sits centrally on the nape of the neck, with the cardinal points marked by small letters above, left, right and below. The star is outlined with fine lines and partly shaded in grey, with light stippling on some points. The ink has softened to a pale grey tone, and the photograph is taken from behind with the hair pulled up and the subject's hands near the neck.

Neck Compass Compass rose Star Cardinal points Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 6.40 to Carlisle is already idling when you reach the platform, and Mr Pryce has left the signal lamp unlit again. You climb the box steps with your coat buttoned wrong and find the brass compass on the shelf where he always keeps it, its glass cracked straight across the north.

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"Points are frozen at Dunmere," says the lad from the telegraph office without looking up. "Go by the old line or don't go at all."

You know the old line. Your father drew it for the company forty years back, a pencil star on the back of a survey sheet, eight rays and the four letters around it like a family argument settled in capitals. When they shut the goods yard he gave you the sheet and said keep it dry. You never framed it. You folded it into the ticket drawer, and the pencil went soft and grey, the way chalk fades off a wet platform by noon.

So you take the compass, tap the cracked glass with a thumbnail, and watch the needle shiver and settle on east. East is wrong for Dunmere. East is the sea and the ferry and nothing you hold a ticket for. You stand there a long minute with the lever cold in your palm, listening to the engine breathe, and then you pull it anyway, because the old sheet only ever showed you where the roads ran, never which one to take.

Down the line the frost-white signal drops. The carriage door bangs shut. You step back from the edge and watch the train take the east road, and for once you do not check the needle to see if you were right.