Black and grey compass rose tattoo with scrolled ornamental arms on the side of an ankle, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black ornamental compass rose sits on the side of a foot near the ankle. Its four long arms are tipped with curling scrolls and dots, with a small mark at the top, and the lines are bold and uniform. The photograph is monochrome, with the tattoo centred against soft skin and a dark background.

Ankle Compass Compass rose Scrollwork Swirl Cross Star Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose was the last thing Mercy Tull drew on any chart, and Master Hollis would not let her start with it. 'Lines first,' he said, rapping the table with his pipe. 'A rose is only a boast until the coast is under it.'

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She had spent a winter copying soundings from the logs of the Dunmore brig, and by February her hand had learned the small scrolls that curled from the tip of each arm, the dots at their ends like full stops on a letter nobody had finished writing. She practised them on scrap paper while the stove ticked. Hollis never looked at the scraps. He looked at her lines, and where they wandered he said nothing at all, which was worse.

In April the brig came in with its sternpost split and a single surviving log, water-stained past reading except for a column of bearings in the last hand, which was Tom Dunmore's, her brother's. She sat with the magnifier until the window went from grey to pearl, copying each bearing onto clean vellum, and when she reached the north point she drew the rose without asking leave. Its top arm bore the little mark she had copied from Hollis's own old plate, a tiny N like a hook.

Hollis came down at seven, saw the sheet, and was quiet for so long she thought he would take the pen from her. Instead he slid the chart toward the window so the light lay across the ink. 'Now it's a map,' he said, and went to put the kettle on.