Traditional style compass star with a red rose at its centre and ornamental scrollwork, tattooed on the upper thigh in black, grey and red ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass star and rose on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A compass star sits inside a thin circle, with scrolled ornamental flourishes extending from each point. A red rose in shaded black and grey rings sits at the centre. The bold black outlines and grey shading are mostly black and grey, with the rose providing the only red.

Traditional Thigh Compass Star Rose Scrollwork Circle Ornament

Find an artist for this

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 lobby map of Brackenhall House had lost its north sometime over the winter, when damp got behind the Perspex and bled the paint off the compass rose in the middle of it. Nobody on the eleventh floor could tell which way the car park was anymore, so the complaints came to me. I was the caretaker, which meant I had the bucket, the tin of matt black, and the steady hand my dad always said I'd got from his side, the side that went to sea.

Keep reading

I took the map off its screws on a Tuesday and carried it up to flat 34, where Mr Okonedo kept a drafting table he'd won in a raffle at the Rec. He lent me his fine brushes and a pot of enamel red and didn't say a word while I worked. The star came first, four long points drawn with a ruler and a prayer, then the thin ring around it, then the scrolled flourishes curling off each point like frost on a windscreen. The rose took me longest. I kept mixing the red until it matched the lid of my father's tobacco tin, the only thing he ever carried aboard a ship that wasn't a wage or a letter.

When I finally fixed the map back on the wall, I realised I'd never checked the needle against anything real. I'd just drawn what I remembered from his chart table, which hung in the front room until the day we sold the house. Mr Okonedo stood beside me with his hands in his pockets and squinted at the star. He tapped the top point and said the car park was that way, and I said it was, and we both knew neither of us was sure.

That evening a girl from the fourth floor stopped in front of it with a carrier bag of shopping and traced the red rose with one finger. She asked which way was home. I pointed to the glass doors, and she nodded as if that settled it.