A compass rose tattoo with scattered coloured leaves, petals and dots on a person's upper back, reaching up towards the neck in a botanical style.

Compass rose with colourful leaves on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A black compass rose with a turquoise centre sits at the centre of the back, with a small fleur-de-lis-like mark and a further symbol above it. Surrounding the compass are loose, scattered leaves, petals and dots in purple, pink, orange, blue and green, with softer, painterly edges. Colour ink dominates the composition, with the strong black compass providing contrast against the pale skin.

Botanical Back Compass Compass rose Leaves Petal Flower Dot Fleur-de-lis Star Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass set into the hall floor at Marram House has never pointed north. My grandfather said a sea captain laid it in 1890 and got the bearing wrong on purpose, so that guests would always have to ask the way. Mum said the boards had warped in the 1953 flood and pulled the lines out of true. We argued about it most Sundays, the way other families argue about football, and nobody ever touched the brass to check.

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Mr Pell arrived in October with a road atlas under one arm and a biscuit tin under the other. He had drawn coastlines for an insurance firm for forty years, he said, and retired to the sea to finish something. Each morning he sat on the front step pressing sycamore leaves from Cliff Road between the pages of the atlas. "Every leaf on this street has come from somewhere else," he told me. "The wind is a poor navigator, but it has never once been lost."

The equinox gale came in on a Tuesday and tore the back gate off its hinges. When I went to shut the front door, a fistful of leaves came skidding across the threshold and settled around the brass rose, purple and orange and a blue like cold tea, bright against the wet wood. Mr Pell knelt beside them with his wristwatch held flat on the floor. "Eleven degrees out," he said, pleased. "Exactly as it was drawn. Leave it. The mistake keeps the house honest."

He checked out the next morning and left the atlas on the hall table with a note tucked inside the cover. Keep the leaves. Let the wind choose. I swept the rest into a biscuit tin that smelled of his tea, but I left the blue one lying in the centre of the rose, where the turquoise stone would have been. I still can't say which way he went. I only know the brass is still eleven degrees wrong, and I am glad of it.