Colour and grey compass rose tattoo with two red roses, green leaves and a fleur-de-lis, shaded in Traditional style on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose with two roses on the side

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large compass rose sits at the centre, with grey shaded points inside a beaded ring and a small fleur-de-lis at the top. Two red roses with dark shading flank the compass, and green leaves curl around the design, with script letters marking N, W and S. The black and grey shading on the compass contrasts with the muted red and green colour in the flowers and leaves.

Traditional Botanical Ribs Compass Compass rose Rose Leaves Fleur-de-lis Script letter

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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 brass compass had stopped pointing north the week Tomas Rell's boat went down off the Skerries, and Maud Pennick, who kept the chandlery on Quay Lane, would not let anyone else touch it. She set it on the sill of the shop window where the salt light came through, and every morning she turned the rose a little with her thumb, the way you would turn a sleeping child, and watched the needle wander and settle on nothing she could name.

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The fishermen came to look at it. Old Hebb said the lodestone had been jolted loose, and that a magnet in a glass case would remember its bearing if you gave it time. Maud said time was all she had given anyone. So she waited. In March the needle swung hard to the west and held there. In April it crept back towards the east, and that was the week two red roses came up through the cracks in the harbour wall, which nobody had planted and nobody could explain.

Maud took a pair of shears down to the wall at dawn and cut them, one for each hand, and carried them back up the lane. She laid them on the counter beside the compass. The needle lifted, trembled, and turned its point north at last, steady as a hand on a rail. Hebb swore it was a coincidence. Maud swept the petals into a tin and said nothing, because a true bearing never asks whether you are ready to follow it.