Black and grey pencil-style drawing of a compass rose with spiked points, a central hub, looping scrollwork and scattered ink dots, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Compass rose with swirls and ink dots

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a compass rose with long pointed arms, a central circular hub and a ring that loops behind the points. Curling scrollwork and small ink dots surround the motif, which is rendered with hatched shading and fine outlines. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background with black bars at the top and bottom.

Compass Compass rose Circle Scrollwork Swirl 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 ink in the pot has thickened again, so you stir it with the bone handle of a broken pen while gulls squabble over fish heads on the quay below. Old Marrin never let you touch the brass dividers until the summer you turned sixteen, and even now he watches your hands the way a fisherman watches a new net. Today he has left you the rose to finish. Eight points, he said, and no two alike, because the sea does not run in straight lines and neither should the charts that carry men across it.

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You draw the long arms first, hatching each one with tight strokes so the light sits on a single side. The hub gets a ring you go over three times until the paper nearly tears. Behind the points you loop a band of circle, the way the tide drags a rope round a bollard, and then the scrollwork creeps in from the margins because Marrin says every chart needs a little weather. You flick ink off the nib and the dots land where they land. He does not correct them.

The Nelly Vane went down in the north gap last winter, and the chart she carried was one of his, drawn before you could hold a pen. Her mate came in the week after with a sodden roll under his arm and asked for a copy. Marrin pushed it across the counter to you without a word, and you spent three nights working from the ruined original, smoothing the blots and keeping the hatching exactly where the wet had lifted it.

When you set down the last dot, Marrin holds the sheet to the window. He taps the north arm, which you have drawn a hair off true, and you wait for him to say so. Instead he hands the sheet back and nods at the harbour, where the lamp on the point has just been lit against the dusk.