Compass rose tattoo on the upper back with pink, blue and purple watercolour splashes and the word Wanderlust in cursive script.

Compass rose with Wanderlust script on back

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A detailed compass rose sits at the centre, with dark sketchy linework, dotted tracing lines and the letters E and S around the rim. Soft watercolour washes in pink, turquoise and purple run behind and around the compass, and the word Wanderlust curves along the left side in black script. The design is centred on the upper back and shot straight on.

Back Compass Compass rose Wanderlust Watercolour splashes Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the forest begins where the last cottage ends, at the stile behind Hobb's Lane, and that nobody who walks past the third oak comes back before supper. Your mother says it at the sink without turning round, the way she says most things. You are fourteen, and the compass in your coat pocket is brass and older than both of you, its glass cracked across the N. Your grandfather drew the rose on its lid himself, inking the points by hand and then washing blue and rose over them so the sea seemed to rise through the paper.

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On the Sunday the needle stops shivering and swings south, steady as a held breath. You take it as a dare more than a sign. You climb the stile with bread in your satchel and the word WANDERLUST scratched inside the lid in his looping hand, and the trees close behind you like a door. The light goes green, then turquoise, then a strange violet where the path forks three ways. Every fork has a dotted line pressed into the moss, running out from the centre like ripples, and each one bends the wrong way for home.

You follow the needle until the trail opens onto a clearing with a single stone pillar, its four faces carved with E, S, W and N. Beneath the S someone has scratched a small arrow pointing back the way you came, and beside it a date that is your grandfather's birthday. You stand there longer than you mean to, the bread going soft in your satchel, until a blackbird starts up somewhere above you like a bell being rung for no reason.

You turn around. The needle wavers, then settles north, towards the village lights just beginning in the dusk. Halfway back you hear your name called from the stile, and you answer it without hurrying.