Black compass rose tattoo with red accents, dots and a circle of lettering on a person's upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Compass rose with circular lettering on back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large compass rose sits at the centre of the composition, with a black eight-point star, a red centre point and a dotted red circle around it. A ring of script lettering and dashed guide lines surround the compass, with scattered dots and small compass points marking the outer edge. The black linework and dotwork shading are crisp, with only small touches of red ink against the black.

Dotwork Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Star Circle Dot Dashed line Lettering Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August had made the Hendry orchard heavy and sweet, and Ruth Ashdown walked its rows with a brass compass in one hand and her father's notebook in the other. The notebook was full of planting dates in pencil: Bramley, Discovery, a Cox that had died the winter she turned nine. Wasps drowsed in the windfalls and the grass hissed under her boots. She was meant to be measuring for the new frames, not reading.

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The last entry was in his square capitals, underlined twice: FOLLOW THE DREAM, NOT THE ROW. She had laughed at that when she found it in the shed, because he had never once let a tree stand out of line. Yet the needle kept sliding past the old Russets towards the north wall, where the mortar had been repointed so often it looked like icing. The bearing held steady no matter how she turned her hips.

She sat on an upturned crate and checked his sums. Every reading he had noted pointed to the same stretch of brick, a loose course below the bees' hive. Ruth pried it out with the blade of her trowel, and the bees rose in a low complaint around her wrists. Behind the brick, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff as bark, was a tobacco tin stamped with an eight-pointed star.

Inside lay a folded map of the orchard, every tree marked with a dot, and a single seed envelope labelled in his capitals: FOR WHEN YOU STOP MEASURING.