Black ink compass rose tattoo with a fleur-de-lis at the top and dotwork detail, on the upper back of a woman whose face is not shown.

Compass rose on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits on the upper back, with a fleur-de-lis above the north point and the letters E and S marking the other points. The central star is solid black and grey with shaded facets, surrounded by fine dotted rings, tick marks and a mandala-like pattern of lines and dots. The skin tone is warm and the photo is taken from behind, with the subject's hair and a thin necklace visible at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Mandala Dot Star Circle Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ilse, The chart room on the Marrowgate has a brass rose set into the deck, and the bosun swears the first crew who sailed the Solent after the drowning years laid it down, when the sea came up over Portsmouth and nobody could say which way was north. I told him compasses are only a habit, but he took my hand and turned me round three times until I could not find the door.

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Yesterday the fleur-de-lis on the north point cracked free of its mount, so I spent the afternoon with a loupe fixing it back in resin. Under the old lacquer someone had scratched the letters E and S, and beside them a word in a dialect nobody speaks now. The ring of dots around the rose is a count, one dot for each day the first surveyors spent out past the buoys. There are more than four thousand. I counted twice because I could not believe it.

The charts we drew this spring have no rose at all. The office wants clean satellite grids, and I agreed, because the grids are right and the roses are only pretty. But last night the wind backed round to the east, and I found myself steering by the star on the deck instead of the screen, and the screen was wrong by the width of a finger.

So I am keeping the rose. Come up in June and I will show you where the brass has worn pale under a century of boots, and you can tell me which way north is. I think it is still the way the fleur points.