Black compass rose with rainbow watercolour splashes and the words Not all who wander are lost curved beneath it, tattooed on an upper back.

Compass rose with watercolour splash on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black compass rose with bold points sits at the centre of the design, with the letters N, E, S and W and smaller intercardinal markings around its outer ring. Behind the compass, soft watercolour washes in red, orange, yellow, green and blue spread outwards, and a curved script line reading Not all who wander are lost runs along the bottom. The photograph is taken from behind, showing the upper back and the nape of the neck with the head cropped out of frame.

Back Compass Compass rose Watercolour Quote Script Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the bit of the hearth that spits. Yes, you, with the cold feet. The forest at the top of Lower Ashby has a path that goes round the bog three times before it lets you out, and Old Hanna walked it every spring with a satchel of paints on her back, because the dyers in the valley paid her in wool for the colours she carried up. She was not lost. She knew exactly where she was. She was only somewhere she had not yet been.

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Her grandson Tobias, who could not sit still for a whole Sunday, wanted a map of the wood for the schoolroom wall. Hanna told him maps were only honest if you drew them with the wind in mind. So they went out with a brass compass that had lost its needle years before, and she taught him to draw the star on a flat stone: four long points for the main ways, four shorter ones between, and the letters set down in plain black, because the wind does not care for fancy hands.

Then she dipped her brush in the red of the rowan berries and the yellow of the broom, and washed the colours outward like weather, green where the moss grew thick, blue where the sky had given up on the clearing. Tobias asked which way was home. Hanna lifted her chin at the star and said every way is home if you have the compass in your pocket, and every way is lost if you do not.

He took the stone to school and copied it for years. The map still hangs on the schoolroom wall, though nobody remembers the words that curl along its bottom edge. They are in Hanna's small, slanted hand, and they say what she used to tell anyone who asked her the road: not all who wander are lost, child. Most just haven't looked at the stars yet.