Colour traditional tattoo of a compass in an octagonal frame with yellow banners reading BRING ME THAT HORIZON, on a person's upper back.

Compass with banners on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A compass rose sits in the centre of an octagonal frame, with a yellow banner above and below. The compass uses red, blue and yellow ink with bold black outlines, while the frame is shaded in grey and brown. The tattoo is centred on the upper back, with the lettering on the banners clearly readable.

Traditional Back Compass Banner Lettering Horizon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Tennant had mended the same brass compass for forty winters, and still the needle would not settle on north in the harbour of Skerrow when the fog came in. The fishermen said it was pointing at something beyond the breakwater. They brought it to her wrapped in oilcloth, and she opened the case on her kitchen table and looked at the rose inside, its red and blue points gone dull with salt. "It wants a horizon," she told the boy who had carried it up the hill. "Every needle does. You can't find your way home from a place you've never seen the edge of."

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Her grandson Ivo had sailed the Lark to the far banks the summer before and not come back. The town knew it, and she knew it, and nobody in Skerrow said his name aloud on the quay. So when the boy asked what she meant, she took down the old chart case and unrolled a sheet with a ring of eight painted walls around the sea, and pointed at the faded word on the lowest band: fetch.

Her hands shook when she set the needle over the paper. The brass swung, shuddered, then turned slowly toward the gap where the chart ran off the edge into blank cream. "There," she said. "That's the way he went." The boy asked whether they should go after him. Maud shook her head and folded the chart carefully along its creases.

"No. Bring me that horizon, Ivo always said, and then he'd laugh and go and find another one. You don't drag a man back from the edge of the world. You wait at the harbour wall, and you let the needle keep turning."