Black ink geometric mandala with a compass star at its centre, tattooed on the outer thigh of a leg.

Mandala and compass star on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A mandala-style design sits on the outer thigh, with a compass rose star at its centre whose long points extend beyond the rings of the pattern. The linework is crisp and dark, with dotted and hatched detail filling the petals and rings, and the shading is solid black. The tattoo is framed by pale skin and a pink garment at the bottom edge of the photo.

Geometric Thigh Mandala Compass Compass rose Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have walked the curtain wall three times since Tuesday, and the brass compass in your coat keeps pointing north-north-west, as if the castle had been turned on its wheel and then forgotten. Mrs Ashby at the lodge says the keep was laid out in rings, cloister inside wall inside wall, and that the old masons set the chapel floor as a rose so the sun through the lancet would mark the hours across the flags. The sun has not reached those flags in four hundred years. Ivy has the lancet now.

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On the fourth morning you kneel in the nave with a chalk line and a steel rule, because surveying is the only thing you know how to do when people are watching you not cry. One spoke of the rose is cracked clean through. Under the grit, every petal is cut with tiny dots and hatched lines, the work of someone with more patience than sense, filling each margin until there was nothing left to fill. You run the longest spoke out through the doorway, across the dead meadow, toward the ridge where the coach road once ran down to the sea.

The compass in your pocket shudders, swings, and then lies still, pointing exactly along that spoke. You laugh, and the sound startles a jackdaw off the parapet. Your father used to say a compass tells you where north is, never where you are, and you thought at the time that was a complaint.

You close the chalk circle, wipe the rule on your sleeve, and leave the rose as the masons left it. Let the next surveyor find the lines and follow them out past the wall, the way you are going to.