Close photo of a fine line black compass rose tattoo on a woman's chest between her breasts, with small stars and a fleur-de-lis above.

Compass rose on the sternum

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits centrally on the chest, with an eight-point star at its heart, a dotted circle around it, and a fleur-de-lis, small stars and compass letters N, E, S and W around the outside. The linework is thin and fairly uniform, with light shading inside the star points and no colour. The woman holds the cups of a black bra with both hands, and her bare torso fills most of the frame against a plain pale wall.

Fine line Chest Compass Compass rose Star Fleur-de-lis

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart room at the back of Gilder's Wharf smelled of lamp oil and wet wool, and you had been bent over the same sheet since the bell for the turn of the tide. Mr Pyke wanted the rose drawn in fair before the Margaret Ann cleared the bar at first light. Eight points, a fleur-de-lis set at north where the old surveyors liked to claim things, and the small stars he called the sailors' company. Your nib had split twice. The dotted circle would not close.

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Old Ada came in off the quay with a herring crate on her hip and watched you wipe the pen on your sleeve. "Start from the middle," she said. "Everything on a compass goes out from the heart. The rest is only where the wind lets you stand." So you pricked the centre first, a star of eight thin rays, and the circle closed itself around it like a held breath. You lettered N, then E, S and W, and found the last one had crowded the margin.

Pyke came back at midnight with his hat wet from the fog and read the sheet by the stub of a candle. He said nothing for so long you began to gather your pens. Then he put one blunt finger on the south point, on the small hooked S, and gave a short laugh you had not heard from him before. "My wife made that letter exactly so, the summer before she sailed for Lisbon and didn't sail back. Same lean. Same tail." He folded the chart along its crease and slid it inside his coat, against his ribs, where he kept the things he meant to keep.

In the morning the Margaret Ann went out over the bar with the rose still in his coat, and you stood on the wall until her sails were only a grey thread. Ada was already sluicing fish scales into the gutter. "He'll bring it back," she said, and you were not sure which of them she meant.