Colour traditional-style tattoo of a compass with a star-shaped rose face, surrounded by teal and green leaves and branches, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass with leaves on a limb

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold, colourful compass sits at the centre of the design, with a compass rose in red, yellow, blue and white inside a gold and teal case. Teal and green leaves and thin brown branches wrap around the compass, and a small gold loop sits at its lower left. Thick black outlines and smooth colour fills give the piece a classic flash look against pale skin.

Traditional Botanical Other Compass Compass rose Leaves Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the leaves came down early this year, so the lane to the mill is nothing but gold mud and you would not believe the state of my boots. I have kept your compass on the sill as you asked. The brass case has gone green at the hinge, and the needle still shivers whenever the stove is lit, which Mrs Penrose says is the house breathing. I try not to take it personally.

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The little ring on its side has come loose, so I threaded a length of blue ribbon through it, and the boy from the forge says it looks like a bell rope. He is nine and believes everything. Yesterday he took the compass into Hollin Wood to find the split oak where your father carved our initials, and came back an hour later with a fistful of teal leaves and a scratch down one arm. He said the needle pointed at nothing, then spun, then pointed firmly back into the trees.

I went after him at dusk with the lantern. I will not pretend I was brave. But at the edge of the hollies the red point of the rose lined up with a gap I had walked past a hundred times and never seen, a narrow opening that leads to a clearing where the stream runs the wrong way, uphill, silver in the lamplight.

I did not go in. I pinned a scrap of the blue ribbon to the gatepost so the boy would not follow me, and I wrote the bearing on the back of your last letter. Come home by the road, love, and bring the compass. The needle is still pointing there, and I have left the window open a crack so you can find your way back to me.