Black and white line drawing of a compass rose with two scroll banners reading a quote, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Compass star with quote banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn black linework design shows a compass rose with an eight-point star at the centre, layered over a circle. Two ribbon banners cross the star, one above and one below, carrying a quote in script lettering, with a small flame or candle flame drawn above the top banner. The shading is sketchy hatching in the star points and the image is entirely black ink on white.

Traditional Compass Compass rose Star Banner Ribbon Flame Candle Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your cups still, the lot of you, because this candle is guttering and I'll not tell it twice. Tobias Harrowgate carried a brass compass in his coat for thirty winters, and it never once pointed him home. That was the trouble with it. It pointed north as cheerful as a spaniel, and north was where the ice lay thickest.

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The night the Sallow Mary went down off the Kittiwake Reach, he had that rose clenched in one fist and a stub of tallow in the other. The star on its face had eight points, each one a wind that had drowned somebody, and Tobias swore the cartographer who inked them had done it to keep himself company. He lit the stub from the lantern, watched the flame lean toward the water as if it had somewhere better to be, and tried to read the banners of spray across the glass.

He didn't trust the needle after that. He trusted the lighthouse at Mere Head, which had a lamp that flickered every seventh breath, and he counted those breaths aloud across the swell until the rose on his palm stopped shivering. Some say the needle spun itself to nothing that night, but I was there, and I say it only grew tired of arguing.

When they hauled him onto the shingle, the compass was still in his hand, the glass cracked and the needle wandering in circles. He tossed it into the surf, laughed like a man who'd won a bet, and walked up the beach toward the light with his hands in his pockets. That, my friends, is the only chart worth the ink.