Brown ink drawing of a compass rose with a ship's wheel and anchor at its centre, shown on a cream notebook page, styled as a traditional nautical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with ship's wheel and anchor

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a compass rose with its points marked N, E, S and W, with a ship's wheel and an anchor with rope at its centre. The linework is fine and even, with cross-hatched shading on the wheel spokes and anchor. It is rendered in a single brown ink on a cream page, with the page filling most of the frame.

Traditional Compass Compass rose Ship's wheel Anchor Rope Nautical

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was already half inked when Mrs Ada Pell came in out of the rain, shaking her umbrella over the boards of Scarrow Quay as though the weather had personally insulted her. Tom Greave kept his pen moving. He had been apprenticed to the chart shop for two winters and had learnt that customers who stood that close to the counter wanted something they could not say out loud.

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"Put the wheel in the middle," she said, "where the needle ought to be. Harold always said a man steers by the wheel, not by the compass. The compass only tells him where he's been." Tom pointed out that a rose with no needle was no rose at all. She flattened her palm on the paper and said, "Then make it a rose that's lost its way." So he drew the wheel over the centre, its spokes hatched so fine they looked like threads, and sank the anchor beneath it with its rope trailing down toward the S.

The Mary Ellen had gone down off the south point in February, in a gale that had taken three boats and given back only one. Ada did not say this. Tom knew it from the harbour gossip, and from the way she kept looking at the S as if it were a door somebody had left open. When he lengthened that arm of the rose by a finger's width, she nodded once and said nothing, which he understood to be thanks.

She folded the finished chart into the inside of her coat, against her ribs, and walked out toward the harbour mouth. Tom watched from the window as the tide turned under the quay wall and the ink on the sheet, still tacky, caught the grey light. Behind her on the counter, the rope ran from the anchor to the edge of the paper and off the table altogether.