Flash sheet of compass rose designs in black, grey, blue and colour, with a few small ornamental cross motifs, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo flash sheet

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows around ten compass designs, ranging from detailed nautical roses with eight-point stars and cardinal letters N, E, S and W to simple bold silhouettes and small ornamental crosses. Linework varies from fine outlines to solid black fills and stippled shading. Most designs are black and grey, while the larger rose and the blue example add yellow, red and blue ink, and the layout is a loose grid of separate motifs on a white background.

Traditional Geometric Compass Compass rose Nautical Star Ornament Cross Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Madge Tolliver had the big top down to canvas by the third day of rain, and the compass was missing again. Her brother Ivo swore he had hung it on the hook by the caravan door, but the hook held only a loop of baling twine and a rust-brown rivet.

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The show was owed to Ledbury on Saturday, in a field the council had promised for a fortnight, and nobody had a map that still showed the lane. Their last clown had taken the good one when he left for a job stacking trolleys in Swindon. Madge went through the props trunk: a sequinned hoop, three sets of tin epaulettes, a crate of unsold programmes with the same lion on every cover. Under them, wrapped in a stocking, she found the brass case, its glass cracked into a star.

She opened it on the bonnet of the lorry. The needle had come loose, but the card beneath still bore its eight points, the N tipped with a fleur and the letters ringed in old ink. Ivo came out with a torch and a mug of tea gone cold. 'Which way's north?' he asked, as if she would know. She turned the case until the spike of the star lined up with the lane through the hedge. 'Wherever this says,' she said. 'We go where it points, then we ask the first farmer what day it is.'

They pulled out at dawn with the wagons in a line and the empty lion cage rattling behind. Ledbury was eleven miles off, but the field was there, flat and sodden, exactly where the card had promised, with a gatepost marked in faded chalk. Ivo stood in the wet grass and laughed until he coughed. Madge put the compass in her coat pocket, where the cracked glass kept catching the light.