Black and grey pencil sketch of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis top and a shaded feather below, drawn as a tattoo design.

Compass rose with feather design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a compass rose with a star-shaped centre, dotted outer ring and the letters N, W, E and S marking the points. A fleur-de-lis sits at the top, and a shaded feather hangs from the bottom along the vertical axis. The linework is fine and the shading is in soft greys on a plain pale background.

Compass Compass rose Feather Fleur-de-lis

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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

The Pier Ballroom at Porthkerris had a floor that sloped toward the sea, so every waltz ended a little further from where it began. My mother swore the surveyor had been drunk. I believed her until the October night Tom Ashworth walked in with a brass compass in his breast pocket and a grey feather pushed into his hatband.

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He didn't ask me to dance. He stood by the pillar and turned the compass slowly under the lamps, watching the needle swing and settle, swing and settle. "It's never wrong," he said. "Only the floor is." He showed me the card under the glass, the points painted like long thin rays, a fleur-de-lis at the top to mark the north, and a single H where the N should have been. "H for home. My grandfather had it made in Hull. He said north was a matter of opinion."

We danced the last waltz to a band playing Moonlight Bay a semitone flat. When the lights came up he pressed the feather into my palm. It was warm from his hat, and he said it had come off a gull that followed his trawler for three days out of Hull, refusing to land. I asked where he was bound. He lifted the compass, turned it toward the doors, then the floor, then me, and the needle would not rest.

"Here," he said. "That's the trouble with it."

The next morning the pillar was bare and the boards were wet. I found the compass in the gutter on the seaward side, face up, the needle still shivering toward nothing in particular. I put it in my coat beside the feather and climbed the hill the long way, the way the floor would have tipped me anyway.