Black and grey fine line tattoo of the words Follow Your Heart above a compass rose on a person's upper back.

Follow your heart and compass on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an upper back with the words FOLLOW YOUR HEART in thin, upright capitals across the shoulder blade area. Below the lettering is a compass rose with a star-shaped centre, the N, E, S and W points labelled, and fine linework with light shading. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame against pale skin, with dark hair and shadow at the top edge.

Fine line Lettering Back Compass Compass rose Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass compass in the wheelhouse of the Marigold had been wrong since the Dogger Bank, swinging a point east whenever the cargo shifted. Captain Aske would not hear of replacing it. So each morning the cook, Nell Harrow, carried a pan of hot water up the companionway and set the card floating in it, and the cabin boy Samuel turned the needle with a spoon until it settled. He was eleven and had been told that a true needle and a true heart were much the same thing.

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One grey morning in the Pentland Firth the cook found him in the galley with the spoon in his fist, staring at the pan. The needle would not settle. "It's chasing something," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word. Nell took the spoon, dried it on her apron, and tipped the whole pan into the scullery sink. Then she took a knife to the galley table, where years of stew had worn the grain smooth, and cut a ring, and inside the ring a star with eight points, the long ones marked N, E, S and W.

"Where's north on that?" he asked. She told him north was wherever the longest point lay, and that a sailor who kept his eyes on the wake would always know which way the ship had come. Then she sent him up with the bread for the watch.

When he came back down the table was scored with more than the star. Beneath it, cut shallow and upright, were the words FOLLOW YOUR HEART. He ran his thumb along the letters and found they were already worn smooth by the same hands that had been scrubbing the board for years. He did not ask who had cut them. He took the spoon from the sink, and when the Marigold ran into the lee of Stroma that afternoon, he steered her in by the star and never once looked at the brass.