Two women seen from behind, each with a small black compass rose tattoo on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching compass tattoos on two backs

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two women are photographed from behind, with their backs to the camera and their faces not shown. Each has a small compass rose tattoo on the upper back, drawn with bold black linework and a central circle with a star-like inner design. The tattoos are dark grey to black, and the warm, slightly faded tones of the photograph sit against a plain pale wall.

Geometric Back Compass Compass rose Star Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The needle had stopped again below the cairn at Hollin Gap, trembling and then settling on nothing, and Nell swore at it the way her father used to. Behind her the mules stood with their heads down and their breath smoking, and the wind pushed flat sheets of snow across the track. Ada crouched beside the pack frame and wiped the glass with her thumb. 'It's the cold,' she said. 'Brass doesn't like it any more than we do.'

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They had carried a compass since they were girls, two of them cast from one mould at the foundry in Settle, so that whichever way one pointed the other would agree. Their grandmother had engraved the faces herself: a ring of sixteen points, and at the centre a small hard star that she insisted was the only true north anyone needed. Nell trusted the ring. Ada trusted the star. It was the one thing they had never argued about.

Now the star was a smear of grey and the ring kept swinging, and somewhere below them the lamp at Dunmere hut should have been showing. Nell took out her dial, held it flat on her palm, and waited. The needle shivered, found the same line as before, and held.

'Then we go on this way,' Ada said, and for once she did not reach for the map.

They went down the far side in single file, each mule's bell a small honest sound in the white. At the bottom, where the track bent around the beck, a lantern moved in the dark and then stopped, as if someone had been holding it up for hours. Nell lifted her compass, and the needle, at last, swung round to point straight at it.