Black and grey pencil drawing of a compass with three ribbon banners reading Before you ask which, Way to go, remember and where you've been, shown as a tattoo design.

Compass with quote banners design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn compass sits at the centre of the design, with a needle pointing up and a second needle pointing left, set within a ringed case with hatched shading. Three ribbon banners cross the compass, carrying the lettering Before you ask which, Way to go, remember and where you've been. The linework is in black ink on cream paper, with fine hatching and stippling for shading and no colour.

Compass Banner Ribbon Quote Arrow Lettering Needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Out past the salt flats, where the road gave up pretending to be a road, a carter called Ansel Vey wore a brass compass on a cord round his neck. Its needle would never settle north. Men said it pointed at whatever you were running from, and they said it with a grin, as if that was a joke.

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One dry spring a widow named Maren Oake came to his wagon at dusk, leading two goats and carrying a sack of salt. She had walked four days. "Which way is the well at Tollin?" she asked. Ansel did not look at the needle. He looked at her boots, grey with road dust and split at the seams, and said, "Before you ask which, tell me where you've been."

She told him: the mill town, the debts, the husband who had gone east and never written. Each place she named, the needle swung and settled a little more firmly, until its arrow pointed straight up the road behind her. Ansel nodded. "The way to go is already written in the miles you've walked. Go back the way you came and take the left fork you skipped by the dead oak."

She laughed, thinking it a trick, but she went back anyway. At the dead oak she found a fork she had not seen on the way out, marked with a small cairn of white stones. Beyond it lay the well at Tollin, and in the post house there a letter from the husband, waiting for her since spring. Ansel kept his compass. Some said he gave it to her, and some said he only pointed.