Pencil-style drawing of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis at north, a skull and crossed pistols at its centre, on an aged parchment background.

Compass rose with skull and crossed pistols

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a compass rose with a fleur-de-lis at the top, and a shaded human skull over crossed flintlock pistols at the centre. The linework is fine and hatched, with shading on the skull and pistols, and the compass points are labelled around a double ring. The drawing is in dark ink on a sepia, parchment-textured background.

Compass Compass rose Skull Pistol Fleur-de-lis

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias, the tide has turned and so has my luck, though not in the way Mr Pell promised when he took your shilling for the eastern sheet. I am writing by the one lamp still lit in the chart room at Redcliffe Wharf, and the rain is coming sideways off the Avon, so forgive the blots. Pell has gone home to his wife. He left me the copper plate for the compass rose and a note telling me to finish the border before the Admiralty clerk comes on Thursday.

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The rose is nearly done. Thirty-two points, the fleur-de-lis set due north because Pell insists north belongs to the French kings, and a pair of flintlocks crossed beneath the skull at the centre, which I did not want and could not refuse. He said every honest chart needs a warning. I hatched the shadows in that skull until my wrist ached. It seems to look back at me when I work late, which is nonsense, and I know it.

Last night a man knocked at the side door, soaked to the bone, asking for the western reaches. He had a pistol in his belt, and he showed it to me the way another man might show a letter of introduction. I gave him the sheet I had drawn for the Hope, not the one for Carrick Rock. He smiled at the north point, then turned the sheet over and read the back, where I had pencilled one line: the true bearing lies south of what you were told. He tipped his hat and walked out into the rain without a word.

I am sending this with the carter at dawn, along with the finished rose. Hang it with the flintlocks to the wall. And if Pell asks who drew the skull, tell him it was his idea. Yours in haste, Walter.