Black and grey compass rose tattoo with fine lines and N, E, S and W markings on the centre of a bare lower back, with hands visible at the edges of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on the lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of a bare back, with a star-shaped point design, concentric rings and long radiating lines extending outwards. The linework is fine and precise, with soft grey shading giving the rose some depth, and the compass letters are drawn in a small serif style. The warm-toned skin fills the frame, with a pair of hands visible at the lower edges, and the tattoo is placed near the middle of the composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had come round to the east for the third week running, and Old Marrit would not plant the beans until the rose on the terrace agreed with her. She knelt on the flags with a bent iron nail and scraped the moss from the N, the E, the S and the W, the letters worn to pale ghosts by eighty winters of boots.

Keep reading

Her grandson Tobiah stood at the gate with a sack of cuttings and a buyer's offer folded in his coat. He asked why anyone would keep a map in the ground when the roads were on paper. Marrit told him the rose had been laid by a sailor's widow named Keziah, the year her husband's boat went down off the Skerries, and that she set every line to a true bearing so no path in the garden could lead anywhere but home.

Tobiah laughed at that. He took his brass compass from his pocket and held it flat on the N, and the needle swung, stuttered and settled a finger's width off true, pointing at the wall where the old door had been bricked up.

Marrit took the compass from him, turned it once in her palm and gave it back. "Then the door was never the trouble," she said, and went back to her beans. Tobiah stood a long while by the rose, then knelt beside her in the cold dirt and began to dig.

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