Small compass rose tattoo on the inner wrist, with a bold black outline, red and yellow accents and a dark star-shaped centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose on the inner wrist

Other · Mixed · Photo

A small compass rose sits inside a circular black outline on the inner wrist. The compass points are shaded in black and grey, with red and orange highlights on the main arms and a yellow centre. The design is centred on a pale skin background, with a softly blurred green and grey outdoor setting behind the arm.

Other Compass Compass rose Star Nautical

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

The compass had come in with Albert Keane at ten past three, found sitting on the bottom stair of the east stairwell in his pyjamas, holding it open on his knee as if it were a hymn book. Maureen Pryce took it off him for the notes and then gave it back, because he asked three times in a voice like a foghorn and she could not think what harm a bit of brass could do.

Keep reading

By four he was steady enough to talk. He had been a deckhand on a coaster out of Hull, forty years of watches, and he said the needle had never once lied to him, only to the men who shook it. "She's gone soft in the damp," he said, tapping the glass. Maureen watched the needle swing and settle, slowly, pointing past the nurses' station towards the side wards. She did not believe in bearings. She believed in obs charts and a second cup of tea gone cold on the trolley.

At half four the call bell for bed nine lit up. Mrs Gwen Hollis, who had not spoken since Tuesday, was awake and asking for her husband, who had died in the spring. Maureen went with the compass still in her apron pocket, where it ticked against her pen. When she reached the bed the needle had stopped dead, pointing straight at the pillow.

Behind her, in the corridor chair, Albert called out, "Told you. Always the nearest port." Maureen drew the curtain. Mrs Hollis's hand was open on the blanket, and Maureen laid the little compass in it, and the old woman closed her fingers around it as if she had finally been given directions home.