Black compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the heel of a foot, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on the heel

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black compass rose with a ring of tick marks, a central hub and eight pointed arrows sits on the back of a foot near the heel. The compass points are labelled N, E, S and W, with intercardinal arrows between them, and the lines are solid black with some shading in the centre. The black and white photograph is taken close up against a textured grey surface, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Traditional Other Compass Compass rose Arrow Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been walking the Hollin Wood boundary since before the bell at St Aldred's, pegging out the line the parish had argued over for three generations. The brass compass in her coat pocket had stopped trusting north sometime after the rain, its needle drifting toward the alder stumps as if it had an errand of its own. She stopped at the old boundary stone, unrolled the survey sheet across its flat top, and weighted the corners with pebbles.

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The compass rose on the sheet was her grandfather's work, drawn in iron-gall ink with a ring of ticks and eight arrows, the letters cramped into his careful capitals. She laid her knife along the N and turned until the arrow lined up with the sun behind the birches. Then she counted paces the way he had taught her, heel to toe, and took the path the arrow pointed to instead of the one the needle wanted.

The path ended at a dry ditch choked with bramble, and for a moment she thought she had been fooled by an old man's drawing. Then she saw the hollow beyond it, the stone chimney of the charcoal burners' hut, and a thread of smoke from a fire someone had banked low for the night. Her boots were full of cold water. Somebody had been waiting.

The man by the fire did not look up. He pushed a second stick into the embers and said the boundary had shifted again, and that he had been keeping the line for her since morning. Nell folded the survey sheet along its creases, the compass rose uppermost, and held out the pencil. "Then you draw it," she said.