Black line drawing of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis at north and dashed bearing lines, shown as a design sketch with no body visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with fleur-de-lis design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a compass rose with an eight-point star at the centre, a fleur-de-lis at the north point and the letters N, E, S and W marking the cardinal directions. Dashed lines radiate outwards and a dashed circle surrounds the star. The image is monochrome with fine, sketchy linework and no shading or background.

Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Star Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pan slides across the range and you catch it with a tea towel, the way Yann taught you on the Ostend run, before the stew goes over the deck. Through the porthole the North Sea is the colour of wet slate. The skipper has said nothing about the weather since Lerwick, and the barometer on the bulkhead has been dropping all morning.

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Above the range, where the soot has never quite come off, Yann's compass rose looks down at you. He scratched it into the paint with a marlinspike the winter he was waiting on a Breton boat that never came, and he drew the letters himself, N, E, S and W, with the fleur-de-lis at the top like a small anchor for the village his mother came from. Every man who has eaten off this galley has been told it is for luck. You always assumed it was decoration.

Then the fog comes down, the gyro sulks, and the mate sends a boy below to ask whether the galley clock is right. It isn't. You stand on an upturned bucket, rub the paint with your thumb and find that the dashed lines run exactly where the bearings on the chart point. Yann drew it true. He always did.

When the boy comes back, you tell him to take the skipper a message: steer by the lily, and mind the Pentland rocks. He looks at you as if you have lost your mind. You don't bother explaining. The stew goes out at six, the fog lifts at seven, and nobody asks why the cook has taken to standing on a bucket with his thumb on the wall.