Fine black cursive lettering with a small compass rose tattoo on the side of the ribs, shown in a sepia photograph with a knitted garment draped over the body.

Cursive word and compass on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of flowing black cursive script runs across the side of the ribcage, ending in a small compass rose with a circular outline and fine radiating points. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against the skin. The sepia-toned photograph is close and shallow in focus, with a knitted garment at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Script Compass Compass rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass had sat in the window of Quayle's chandlery since the autumn the Marigold went down off Spurn, and Ada Quayle had stopped dusting it by February. Nobody in Grimsby wanted a binnacle compass with a cracked glass and a rose worn smooth on its north point. The men who went to sea bought new ones, and the men who came home from the sea bought nothing at all.

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On a wet Tuesday a lad from the fish dock pushed open the door, cap crushed in both hands, and asked whether she had anything that still pointed true. She told him they all did, so long as you kept them off iron and out of the pub. He said he didn't need true. He needed one that would point at a name, and he spelled it out on her counter in pencil, the letters sliding downhill as though they were tired of standing up.

Ada knew the name. It had been painted across the Marigold's stern in letters a foot high, and she had sold her husband the paint. She didn't say so. She lifted the compass from the window, rubbed the glass with the hem of her apron, and watched the needle swing, shiver and settle on the door, which was the only direction anybody in Grimsby had ever been able to rely on.

She took his two shillings and his pencil and, without asking, scratched the name into the brass lid beneath the rose, small and neat. When he asked why she had charged him so little, she said the compass would only ever point one way anyway, and he might as well be the one who chose it.