Black and grey compass rose tattoo with swirling scrollwork and a blackletter E at the east point, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits centrally on the upper back, with a star-patterned hub and long pointed arms marked at the cardinal points. Fine swirling scrollwork curls around the star, and the shading is soft grey with dark accents. The photograph is taken from behind, with the subject's head turned away and the blackletter E at the east point clearly visible.

Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Star Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was nearly finished when the ink began to run, and I should have seen it as a warning. I had spent three winters drawing the coast of Anglesey for Master Pell, every cove and skerry set down by my own pricked dividers, and the rose I put at its heart was the finest thing I ever made. Eight arms, the cardinal four reaching long and dark, the scrollwork between them curling like bracken in a damp wind. At the east point I lettered the E in the old black hand, because Pell insisted a true chart must declare its face to the sun.

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Pell died in January. His widow sold the instruments, the vellum and the chart to a dealer from Chester who paid well and asked no questions about the coast we had both walked. I kept one thing back: the small brass dividers with the worn ring, which I had used to strike the rose's circle true. They still fit my thumb better than any tool since.

The dealer's ship went down off Holyhead in the spring gales. I read it in the Bangor paper, a single column, no mention of cargo. What I could not stop thinking of was the rose, folded in a tarred chest at the bottom of the sea, its arms still pointing true to a north that no longer mattered to anyone. I took the dividers down to the harbour that evening and set them in the tide. Let some other man find his bearings by the E.