Black and grey traditional tattoo of a compass rose with a sun face at its centre, placed across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with sun face on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A healed or fresh tattoo on the upper back shows a compass rose with N, E, S and W letters at the points. At the centre sits a sun with a face, rays radiating outward and a crescent shape to one side. The linework is fine and dark with simple hatching, in black and grey on a plain skin background.

Traditional Back Compass Compass rose Sun Celestial

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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

Pell had been told three times that the rose on the chart had to be finished before the ship sailed on the morning tide, and three times the ink had bled where the north point met the paper. Now the lamp in the back room of Sayer and Dunn guttered over the drying sheet, and the clock on St Nicholas had just struck two. Outside, Corn Street was empty except for a cart rattling towards the quay.

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He had meant to draw the plain eight-pointed star the old master used, but his hand had gone looking for something else. Into the centre he drew a face, round and calm, with a crescent moon tucked against one cheek like a coin held in the mouth. He hatched the rays with short strokes for the shadows, the way his mother had shaded the pewter plates in the kitchen at home. When Mr Dunn came down at six he would take one look and bellow, and Pell had already composed his defence: the sun needed a face, otherwise how would the sailors know which way was morning?

Mr Dunn did not bellow. He held the sheet up to the window, turned it slowly, and then laughed in a way Pell had never heard before. "Your father drew one of these for me when I was a boy," he said. "Said a rose without a sun was a map of nowhere." He pinned it to the wall beside the door, face out, where every captain who came in would see it.

Pell sat on the stool and watched the ink go from wet black to dull grey. The ship sailed at seven with the chart folded inside the captain's coat. Some nights, he thought, a sun was only a way of saying that someone was still awake to mind the compass.