Black compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the upper back of a person with dark hair, shown against a yellow wall.

Compass rose on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark hair falling over one shoulder, showing a compass rose tattoo on the upper back. The design uses clean, single-weight black linework with a small inner ring and eight-pointed star, with the cardinal points labelled N, E, S and W. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against pale skin and a warm yellow background.

Back Compass Compass rose Star Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sat-nav gave up somewhere past the last windmill, and I was left with nothing but my father's brass compass rattling in the cup holder, where it had lived since he died. The road ran so straight it looked ruled onto the land, grey tar going out to a shimmer that never quite arrived. I held the case flat on my knee and watched the needle swing, then settle, then swing again.

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"Eleven degrees," he used to say, tapping the glass where he'd pencilled the number in his cramped capitals. "The card lies a little, love. Magnetic north wanders off from the map north. You allow for it or you end up in somebody else's paddock." I had thought it was one of his fussy habits, like ironing tea towels and reading the back of cereal boxes. Out here it was the only thing that made sense.

So I drove by the eight points stamped on the face, the star arms pointing out like the spokes of a wheel that had decided to go somewhere. Every twenty minutes I stopped, opened the lid, and checked the letters against the sun. The shadows shortened, then lengthened, and I kept the S where the S should be.

The roadhouse appeared at dusk, a tin roof and one yellow bulb. The woman behind the counter said nobody came up from the coast after dark. I asked her which way was west. She laughed and pointed at the sunset, which was the wrong answer and also the right one. I set the compass on the bonnet, waited, and the needle came to rest, steady and certain, pointing back the way I had come.