Black and grey fine line compass rose tattoo with swirled points and an N marker, on the outer ankle.

Fine line compass rose on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small compass rose sits on the outer ankle, drawn with thin black linework. Four long straight arms extend from a central dot, with the north point marked by a letter N and the other points finished with curled, ornamental scrolls. The image is black and white, with the foot set against a dark background and soft shading on the skin.

Fine line Ankle Compass Compass rose Swirl Ornament Cardinal points

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

Mind the wagon step, the one that bites, and sit where the lamp can reach you. No, not there, Tobias, that is where the bear used to sleep before they sold him to the Welsh. Right. Now listen. The Halloran Brothers' Travelling Marvel kept its map painted on the inside of the ringmaster's lid, and at the top of it was a little star with an N beside it, sharp as a hatpin. Every winter old Silas would lift that lid, put one finger on the N, and say, there, that is home. And every spring we went the other way.

Keep reading

By the autumn of that year there were eleven of us left and two horses who would still pull. The tent had more patches than canvas. Nobody came to the Saturday matinee anymore except the gulls. Pip, the rope-walker's girl, was the only one who could still read the lid properly. She said the scrolls at the four points were not decoration. They curled toward the place the wind came from, and that year the wind had been off the sea at Gullhaven, so that was where we would go.

We reached the harbour on a grey Tuesday with the lamp guttering and the last of the sawdust in our boots. The fair was on the front, and a boy with a hoop asked if we were the Marvel. Silas took off his hat and held the lid up to the light. The council had turned every road sign in the county, so the N was nowhere to be found, but Pip put her finger on the rose and walked straight across the car park to a patch of dune grass where our old tent pegs had rusted into the earth.

Silas laughed until he coughed. My father painted that star, he said, and he never once saw the north either. Then he set the lid on the wagon roof, and we pitched the tent by lamplight, and by morning the gulls had come to see the show.