Pencil flash design of an ornate compass rose with a fleur-de-lis point and True North lettering, shown in black and grey without any body placement.

Compass rose with True North lettering

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of an ornate compass rose with a fleur-de-lis at the north point and a shaded eight-point star radiating from a rosette centre. Lettering reads TRUE NORTH at the top, with UNE VIE, EXTRAORDINAIRE and the N, E, S and W points set around the outer ring. The drawing uses black and grey shading with soft graduated tones and no colour.

Neo-trad Lettering Compass Compass rose Fleur-de-lis Lettering Star Rosette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass in the lamp room has been wrong by two points since the storm of '09, and the Admiralty man who came to check it said the iron in the cliff was to blame and went away satisfied. I know better. I have spent eleven winters on this rock with nothing but that needle and the cracked glass over it, and I know which way the sea pulls.

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My brother Tobias drew the rose on the wall of the watch room the summer before he went to sea. He had a good hand with pencil, better than mine with a pen, and he gave the eight points little scrolled barbs like the ironwork on a church gate. Above the north he wrote TRUE NORTH in letters that looked like they were leaning into a wind. Under the ring he put UNE VIE and EXTRAORDINAIRE, which he said was a motto his grandfather had carved over a French chandler's door in Dieppe, and which he thought was the grandest nonsense he had ever read.

The wall is damp now. The shading has bloomed grey at the edges, and the rosette in the middle has gone soft as bread. Last night I put my palm flat over the north point, where the fleur-de-lis sits like a little crown, and the stone was colder there than anywhere else.

I have not moved the needle. I have only started to read it the other way round, the way Tobias would have, and this morning the lamp swung a little further east than it should, and a pale sail came out of the murk exactly where he said it would.