Black compass rose tattoo with stippled shading and coordinate text around the outer ring, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with coordinates

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black compass rose sits at the centre of a double-ringed circle, with eight points radiating outwards and solid black and white highlights. The area between the points is shaded with fine stippled dots, and coordinate-style lettering runs around the outer ring. The image is a close, straight-on photograph against a wooden floor, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Other Compass Compass rose Star Coordinates Circle Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had kept the chart rolled inside a biscuit tin for nineteen years, and when the reunion invitation arrived she unrolled it across the kitchen table and weighted the corners with salt cellars. The school had closed and the gym was flats now, but the coordinates she had copied in Miss Oakes's geography lesson were still there in her careful hand, beside a compass rose Dougie had drawn in biro with far too many points.

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At the Crown on Saturday the room smelled of crisps and wet coats. People compared mortgages and children and who had got fat. Dougie arrived late, grey at the temples, and asked straight away whether she still had the map. She said she did. At fifteen they had sworn to find the spot the numbers pointed to, a harbour no atlas marked, where the water was supposed to go green at noon.

On Sunday they drove up in Dougie's van with his phone propped on the dashboard, its little blue dot sliding closer to the coast. The road gave out at a breakwater with a rusted bell buoy clanging somewhere out past the rocks. There was no green water, only an old man mending nets who looked up and said they were the first visitors in ten years. He squinted at the chart Mara held out, then laughed and said his father had marked that ground to keep the council's surveyors away.

Dougie wrote the numbers again on the back of a beer mat while the old man talked. Mara took it, folded it twice and pocketed it, and when they drove home the compass rose sat on her knee, its eight points all still pointing somewhere she could not quite reach.