Pencil and ink drawing of a compass inside a hatched frame, with three banners reading Before you ask which way to go, remember where you've been.

Compass with banner quote drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design showing a compass with a ring bail at the top, set within a hatched, shield-like frame. Three curled banners cross the image, carrying the words 'Before you ask which way to go, remember where you've been'. The linework is fine and even, with cross-hatching on the frame and banner edges, and the drawing is in black ink on pale paper with no colour.

Traditional Compass Banner Lettering Arrow Ring Quote

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

Mara had been asked the way to Halsey Pass three times since breakfast, and each time she had answered with a question, which was the only trick her grandfather had left her. The snow had come in sideways off the moor overnight, filling the lane to the height of the gatepost, and the brass compass nailed above the bar, the one the landlord used to settle arguments about the weather, had swung its needle north and stayed there as if it had made up its mind.

Keep reading

The man at the end of the bar kept his coat buttoned to the chin and turned his glass slowly on its beer mat. "Which way is the pass?" he asked again. "Where did you come in from?" Mara said. He thought about it. "The valley road, two days back. Then the chapel track." "Then you already know the way," she said, and watched the question sink in. He had been asking the wrong thing for two days, and the inn had been holding him for it.

The landlord's ledger had a line for every traveller: name, road, and where they had last slept. Mara ran her finger down the column until she found his, written in a hand she didn't recognise, with a small drawn arrow pointing back the way he had come. The chapel track was shut by a rockfall. Anyone wanting forward had to go through the old hollow past the lime kiln, and he had come through there already, in the dark, without noticing.

She pushed the ledger across the wood. He read the last entry, then the one before it, and she saw him understand that the hollow had been his road all along, and that his own name was the only map he needed. He laughed once, quietly, and left a coin under his glass. Outside, the needle above the bar still pointed north, and for the first time that week, nobody asked it anything.