Black and grey blackwork compass rose tattoo with a dotted ring and the words Not all those who wander are lost curved around it.

Compass rose with 'Not all those who wander are lost'

Blackwork · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey compass rose sits at the centre of the image, with its eight-point star shaded in solid black and grey and a ring of dots and concentric circles around it. The words NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST are set in lettering that follows the curve of the compass cardinal lines. The image is a close, centred shot against a dark background with soft lighting on the skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Compass Compass rose Quote Dotted circle Star Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle would not settle, so Thessaly the mapmaker turned the wax tablet face down and sent her son to the harbour wall for a bowl of seawater. He came back wet to the knees and said the fishermen were laughing at her. She told him the sea had never laughed at a true compass, and that fishermen only laughed because they still steered by gulls.

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She had been drawing roses for thirty winters, eight points cut from a single star, each point shaded dark on the side that faced the coldest wind. Around the star she ran rings of fine circles and a ring of dots, one dot for every traveller who had paid to have their journey marked. Corin the tin trader had come in the spring asking for a rose with no dots at all. He wanted to be drawn going home, he said, and he would not be counted among the lost. She sharpened her stylus and told him a dot was only the place where a man had stood and looked around.

When the bowl was ready she dropped the needle in and it swung, shuddered, and pointed past her shoulder at the door. Her son said it was broken. She said it was pointing at the road, which was the only thing a needle could honestly do. Corin left at dawn with a rose folded into his coat, the dots pricked small. Thessaly kept the bowl on the sill, and every evening she added one more dot to the tablet, for whoever had not yet come back to be counted.