Black ink drawing of a circular mountain and wave design with arrows pointing north, south, east and west, shaded in dotwork, shown on white paper beside two marker pens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain and wave compass design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a compass-style design enclosed in a circle, with peaks at the top and rolling waves at the bottom. The mountains are shaded with stippled dots and outlined in clean single lines, while the waves and scalloped water lines are drawn with solid linework. The design is shown in black and grey on white paper, with two marker pens placed at the top right and bottom left.

Dotwork Geometric Mountain Wave Arrow Compass Circle Sea

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

The boat had been drifting for three days when the wind gave up altogether, and Old Hesk turned the bronze disc over in his hands the way other men turned prayer beads. Four arrows ran from its rim. The north arrow pointed to the mountain that rose out of the grey water like a clenched fist, and the south arrow pointed back at the waves that had carried them away from it. "The smith in Orrin swore the arrows never lie," he said. "He never said they would be patient."

Keep reading

His granddaughter Maren had heard the story a hundred times. The smith had made the disc for a fisher who wanted to find his way home from any sea, and he had set the mountain at the centre so that every wave would remember the land. Maren shipped the oars and watched the water. The swell ran in long scalloped rows, each curling back on the one before, and she saw that every crest bent towards the same dark peak.

"Then we row with the waves," she said. "They are not running away from the mountain. They are running to it." Hesk laughed and said the old fishers had told the same tale about their own children. But when the sun went down he stopped laughing, and she saw him watching the sky for stars he could not find.

In the grey before dawn the mountain stood up out of the sea exactly where the waves had promised. Hesk pressed the disc into her palm and folded her fingers over it. "Keep it," he said. "The arrows only ever showed the way the water was leaning. You were the one who noticed."