Colourful compass rose tattoo with black dotted linework and a lettered ring, with watercolour-style splashes, across the upper back.

Compass rose with lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose sits at the centre of the design, with a black star and dotted guide lines extending to the edges. Text follows a circular band around the compass, and the linework is dotted and black. Soft splashes of blue, purple, orange, pink and green sit behind and around the compass, and the composition is centred on the upper back.

Lettering Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Star Text Circle Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and mind the cat, she's been on the good chair since Tuesday. You want the story of the chart-maker's compass? Right then. Old Ezra Pennick kept a shop up the hill from the fish quay in Porthmellin, drawing the coast for every boat that paid him. He was particular. He inked the rose with a steady hand, and when the harbourmaster's wife asked for words round the rim, he obliged, though he grumbled that words are harder to get true than bearings.

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His granddaughter Nell was sixteen and impatient. Tobias Crane, skipper of the Mary Louise, wanted a chart to take out past the Shambles one last time before his knees gave out, and Nell offered to colour it while her grandfather was at his dinner. She wet her brush in a jam jar of river water, smeared the seas in blues and plums and the sour orange of that autumn's sunsets, and dotted the guide lines so they looked like stitching. When her grandfather came back, he stood in the doorway a long time and said nothing.

Then he took her brush, dipped it in green, and dabbed one bright splash exactly where the north line met the rim. "Fog doesn't care what you meant to draw," he said. "Keep the star black and let the rest wander."

Crane sailed at dawn with the chart folded inside his oilskin. He came back two days later, grey as slate and blown well off his course. He unrolled it on the bench, tapped the rim, and read the words aloud the way a man reads a verdict. Nell never learned whether the chart or the weather had brought him in, and her grandfather always said that was the right answer.