Pencil drawing of a compass rose with a ring of lettering reading before you ask which way to go and remember where you have been, shown on graph paper.

Compass rose with lettered ring

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn compass rose with N, E, S and W labels sits at the centre of the sheet, with a segmented outer ring and sixteen pointed rays. Two phrases of lettering follow the curve of the ring, written in a loose, hand-lettered script. The linework is fine and even in black pencil or ink on squared paper, with no colour.

Compass Compass rose Lettering Ring Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father never looked at the compass he carried, not on the tops above Hollin Bank where the fog came down like wet sheeting and the sheep vanished in a breath. He held it flat on his palm the way you'd hold a boiled egg, tapped the glass with a thumbnail, then walked off in whichever direction his nose preferred. You followed because you were nine and he was the only man in Ashworth who whistled on the way to the pit.

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The needle was never the point, he said. It only told you where north had gone to sleep. What mattered was the ring of lettering round the rose, which the man who sold it to him in Keighley had painted by hand: which way to go, before you ask, remember where you have been. You thought it was daft, a thing for a shop window. He laughed at that, then went quiet, and you realised later that he had been counting his steps.

The fog swallowed the stile, then the wall, then the sound of the colliery buzzer. When you finally stopped, your father was gone and the compass lay face up in the heather, its needle wobbling and undecided. You crouched and looked for your own boot prints in the peat. They ran in a loose line behind you, and you followed them back the way you had come, one careful print at a time, until the winding wheel loomed out of the grey like a clock face.

Years later you sat at the kitchen table in Ashworth with a sheet of squared paper and drew the rose again, ray by ray, then the ring of tiny segments. You lettered the words round the curve, slow and loose, and when you reached the top you left the small gap where north should sit. Outside, the pit was shut and the hill was clear. You could see the stile from the window, and the path your footprints had made was still there, grown over but plain enough to follow.