Black ink drawing of a compass rose with N, E, S and W letters, a rope border and dotwork shading, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Compass rose with rope border in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A compass rose sits centred in a circular rope-twist border, with N, E, S and W letters set at the cardinal points. The star points are rendered with fine hatched linework, while the background and central hub use stippled dotwork shading. The drawing is in black ink on pale paper, with a pen lying across the lower left corner.

Dotwork Traditional Compass Compass rose Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold had been tied up at Sallow Lock for nine days when the lock-keeper's daughter came down the towpath with a sack of wet hay and asked for the captain. Her name was Ada Penhallow and she had her father's habit of counting things under her breath. Captain Tobias Wren told her he had no cargo for the lock and no time for visitors, and she said that was a shame, because the river was going to flood the lower meadows by Sunday and somebody would have to take the cattle off the island before the water came up over the rope bridge.

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He asked how she knew. She pointed at the water. It had gone the colour of pewter and was sliding past the piers without a sound. Wren had been on the river forty years and had learned to trust a child who looked at a thing rather than through it. So he took the Marigold up past the weir with his two sons at the poles and Ada standing in the bow with a brass compass her grandmother had carried on a ship to Lisbon. Every time the channel forked she called out a bearing, north by the willows, east where the dead elm leaned, and each time the bearing was right.

They got the last heifer off the island with the water at their knees. When Wren asked how she had known which fork to take, Ada turned the compass over in her palm and showed him the back of it, where someone had scratched a rose of points with a nail and written under it, in a careful hand, Follow the star that never moves. Wren laughed and said the star was a sun and it moved all day long. Ada shrugged and said that was exactly what she had told her father.