Pencil sketch of a compass rose with a leafy tree and twisting roots at its centre, with a heart-tipped loop line running to the east point.

Compass rose with tree and roots sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a compass rose with N, S, E and W points marked. At the centre sits a leafy tree whose roots twist down towards the south point, and a thin looping line with a small heart at its end connects to the east point. The shading is sketchy and mostly black pencil on a pale background, with a faint scribble of illegible handwriting at the top.

Botanical Geometric Compass Compass rose Tree Root Leaves Heart Loop Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, the lot of you, and mind the draught from that door, because Hollin Gate has never once in two hundred winters been a place where a man could stand still in a snowstorm and think kindly of the weather. Now. Do you want the story of the compass tree or will you sit there staring at the wall? Good. Then listen.

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Old Ada Pryce kept this house when I was a boy. She had a cousin, Walter, who drew maps for the coaching companies, and on the morning he left for the eastern ports he pinned a sheet to her kitchen table. North at the top, south at the bottom, and where the tree stood he'd sketched roots that ran southward as if they were trying to reach the sea. 'Whatever you do, Ada,' he said, 'don't let the roots go dry.' She laughed at him. That same spring she planted a sapling by the well, facing the road.

Every year a letter came from the east, folded small, with a heart pressed into the wax. Walter wrote of Riga, of Smyrna, of a girl who sold oranges on a quay. Each letter ended with a loop of ink that wandered off the edge of the page and curled back again, the way a man walks a long way only to find the road home. Ada read them aloud by the fire while the tree outside grew until its crown brushed the upstairs window. Then came the winter the snow closed the pass, and the letters stopped.

Come the thaw, the meltwater dug a parcel out of the drift beside the well. Inside was the same map, the tree drawn larger, and one line added in pencil: The roots go where the water is. Ada took a spade to the yard that morning and found the old lead pipe the roots had split years before. The water had been running south under the cobbles all along, toward the sea Walter never reached. Ada laughed, then sat down on the cold step and didn't get up until dark.