Black and grey dotwork-shaded compass rose tattoo with a fleur-de-lis and scrolls on the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with scrollwork on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey compass rose sits at the centre of the image, with N, E, S and W marked and a fleur-de-lis at the top. Its star points and rings are filled with fine stippled shading, and ornate scrollwork extends from the upper left and lower right. The photograph is taken from behind, with the tattoo filling most of the frame over the upper back.

Dotwork Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Scrollwork Star Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Margaret, the chart you asked after is finished, though not in the way you wanted. Mr Okafor drew the rose on the back of the Admiralty sheet, the one with the Scilly Isles foxed through, and he would not let me trace it in ink until he had stippled every point by hand. Eight points, each a dot upon a dot, so that from across the table the star seemed to tremble when the lamp guttered. The fleur-de-lis he insisted on for north, though the harbourmaster laughed and said a French lily had no business pointing the way home.

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The scrollwork came last, when the paper was nearly ruined with coffee rings. He curled the acanthus out from the northwest like smoke off a snuffed wick, and let the lower leaves tumble southeast toward the margin where the sea runs off the edge of the sheet. I asked him why the ornament should lean away from the lines of the compass. He said that a true bearing is never the thing that keeps a man safe. It is the thing that tells him where the ornament has gone.

I have pinned the finished sheet above my desk. Tell your brother the letters are sound, the E and the W still legible, the S a little blurred where the ink ran. Nothing on it has moved since Thursday, and I find I trust it more for that. Keep the candle lit on the windowsill when the tide turns, and I will post this with the morning boat.