Black and grey compass rose tattoo with a dotted inner ring and blackletter lettering along the lower edge, on a person's back.

Compass rose with blackletter lettering

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large compass rose with N, E, S and W marked at the points sits at the centre of the image, with a star at its core and a dotted ring of diamond shapes around it. The linework is bold and solid, with stippled dots shading the arrow points. Blackletter script curves along the bottom of the design, and the image is rendered in black ink and grey tones against pale skin.

Blackwork Geometric Lettering Back Compass Compass rose Star Diamond Blackletter Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Gull Head had nine rooms and only one clock, and the clock ran a quarter hour slow, so the lodgers never quite caught the morning boat. Mrs Tennant kept the attic key under her apron. When the Harrow brothers came up from Penzance with a trunk that rattled, she gave them the room under the eaves and told them the wind would wake them before the gulls did.

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The younger brother, Ezra, could not sleep for the draught. Each night he counted the diamonds in the dotted ring of plaster above his bed, and each night he counted twenty-four, then twenty-five. On the fifth night he followed the extra one with a candle and found a nail head pushed through the ceiling, and beyond it, a star scratched into the timber. Beneath the star someone had cut a line in old black letters: north lies where the wind is coldest, and it will show you the way home if you stop asking where you are.

He went down to the harbour at first light and found Mrs Tennant already on the wall with her knitting. She did not look up. She said the trunk had belonged to a navigator who had drawn the rose on every door in the house so the fishing boats could keep their bearings, and that the house kept its own compass now, which was why nobody ever got lost in it.

Ezra set the trunk on the quay and opened it. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a brass compass with its needle stuck at south. He turned it slowly until the needle settled on north, shut the lid, and walked back up the hill with the compass in his coat, pointing the way it ought to, which was, Mrs Tennant had said, the only direction a house ever needed.