Black line drawing of a compass rose with arrowheads pointing north-east and south-west, labelled N, E, S and W, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with arrows

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A simple line drawing of a compass rose, with two crossing arrows and the letters N, E, S and W marking the four points. The thin, dark ink lines are even, and the arrowheads at the top and bottom have small feathered details. The design is centred on a plain cream background with no shading or added colour.

Fine line Compass Compass rose Arrow North East South West

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle never lied to me, though the men down the Hollin shaft swore it did. Forty fathoms under the moor, with the lamps guttering and the air thick as wet wool, Ned Cowley would ask me which way was north, and I would hold the brass dial flat on my palm and tell him. He never believed the answer until we had walked it out with the chain.

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My father drew the compass rose on the back of the survey book the year the new level opened. Four letters, two arrows crossing at the centre like a pair of swords laid down. He showed me how the feathered tails on the arrows caught the wind off the spoil heaps, and how a man who keeps his bearings never has to ask the overman for directions. I was nine. I thought it was a drawing for children.

The roof came in on the eleventh of March, at the east drift, where the old workings ran under the chapel. Ten men were on the far side of the fall when the dust came through. Ned was one of them. We had the surveyor's plan, but the plan was wrong by a yard, and the rock had shifted since anyone last measured it.

I laid the rose across the wet page, drew my bearing with the pencil, and walked the line the arrows pointed to, tapping the wall every twelve feet. At the third tap the stone sounded hollow. Ned called back through the gap, cracked and laughing, asking what had taken me so long. I told him I had followed north, which was the only thing I had ever been sure of.