Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with two roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a compass rose inside a ring of triangular points, with two detailed roses, one at the upper right and one at the lower left. The linework is black and fine, with hatched shading on the petals and dotted accents around the compass. It is drawn in black ink on a plain white background with no colour.

Botanical Geometric Compass Compass rose Rose Star Swirl Ornament

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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 is dry on the Calder chart at last, though the wind off the salt marsh keeps lifting its corners, so I have weighted them with Mother's thimbles and the brass dividers you left behind. Forgive the smudge at the southern edge. Pell thought the lamp was steady enough for him to hold it, and it was not.

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The Lady Ysolde wanted the compass rose in the centre, where the old charts keep their saints, and she wanted it ringed with those little saw-teeth points, eight to each star, so that no sailor could mistake which way was home. Then she asked for two roses. One at the north-east, for the harbour at Greyhythe where she was married. One at the south-west, low down by the fen, where the reeds grow so thick the boatmen call it the Lace. I drew the first rose from the walled garden at Thornwick, its petals curled like a folded letter. The second I drew from memory of your hands on the mooring rope, which I suppose makes it a poor likeness, but a true one.

The surveyors came back on Tuesday and swore the river had shifted a full league west since the last chart. Every line I had ruled was wrong. The only true thing on the sheet was the compass itself, because a compass does not care where the river goes. The Lady laughed at that and said we would keep the roses exactly where they were.

So on Monday I take it up to the Hall. I will sign it in the lower corner, beneath the rose that looks most like rain, and I will not tell anyone which one I drew first.

Your loving brother, Aldous