Black and grey compass rose tattoo with an ornate mandala centre and dotwork shading, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits on the side of the ribs, with an eight-point star centred on a layered mandala-style ornament. Fine linework and stippled dotwork shade the petals and inner pattern, while small letters mark the compass points around the star. The photograph is black and white, framed so the tattoo sits near the centre of the image with the torso curving away at the edges.

Geometric Dotwork Ribs Compass Compass rose Star Mandala Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass set into the floor of the Pavilion has worn pale at the north point, where three generations of feet have turned for the last waltz. You know this because you have spent the whole evening counting turns from beside the cloakroom, coat over your arm, waiting for Marguerite Fell to finish her shift at the ticket booth so the two of you can walk home along the front.

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Marguerite taught you the points. She sold you a ticket on your first Saturday, leaned through the brass grille and said the floor was a chart and the band was the wind. North is the bandstand, she said. South is the door you came in by, and you never go back through it. You laughed then. You are not laughing now, because the trombone has started, the lights have gone amber, and she is crossing the room with her hair pinned up in that careless way that means she has been crying in the ladies' and fixed her face afterwards.

She does not ask you to dance. She stands at the centre of the star, where the eight points of the old mandala meet in a ring of fine dots worn almost to nothing, and holds out her hand the way a navigator holds out a pencil. Which way, she says, and you look at the little letters around the floor, the N and the E and the S and W, and you realise she has been waiting for you to say the one she does not already know.

You tell her the truth. It is east, you say, because that is where the sun gets up over the sea and the tide has turned without either of you noticing. She laughs and takes your hand, and the band swings into something slow, and for once the whole room seems to point the same way.