Black line drawing of a compass rose star with a central compass dial and long arrow shapes extending upwards and downwards, shown as a tattoo design.

Compass rose with arrows design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an eight-pointed compass rose with a round compass dial at its centre, surrounded by a ring of tick marks and a needle. Long thin lines extend above and below the star, ending in ornate arrowhead shapes, and short rays radiate outward from the star. It uses solid black fills with white highlights and fine outlines, with no colour and no shading gradients.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Star Arrow Dial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you go telling the lads it was the wind that turned us, because it wasn't. It was Mrs Penhallow's brass dial, the one she kept on the chandlery counter with the glass cracked across its face. We were three days out from Newlyn with the herring boats scattering behind us like gulls, and Tom Ashby swore blind the needle had gone soft. I said a needle can't go soft, Tom, only a man's nerve can, and he threw his cap at me.

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That night the sky closed up over the Lizard and we lost the stars entirely. Only the lamp on the wheelhouse and the thin black rule of the sea. Old Gwen Trewin, who had been at sea before any of us were born, came up from the galley with her sleeves rolled and a tin of biscuits under one arm. She didn't look at the dial. She looked at the arrows painted on the bulkhead, the long ones pointing north and south, and she said, the true way is the one that hurts the least to hold. Then she went back down and left us to it.

We steered by the ringed face and the shaking needle until the grey came up over Penzance, rough and pale as a bad tooth. Tom never said another word about soft needles. Mrs Penhallow wouldn't take a penny for the repair, only asked that we bring the dial back with the glass whole. We never did manage it. Some things come home a little scratched, and that's the only proof worth having.