Black linework compass rose tattoo design with a central ornate monogram, dotwork flourishes and a long pointed arrow-style needle, drawn on a pale paper background.

Ornate compass rose design with central monogram

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A compass rose with an ornate circular monogram at its centre, with the cardinal points marked N, E, S and W. Fine black linework and dotwork flourishes decorate the rays and a long vertical needle, with the design drawn on a pale, mottled background. The composition is symmetrical and vertical, with no shading or colour ink.

Fine line Dotwork Compass Compass rose Monogram Arrow Ornament Cardinal points

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart had been folded so many times that the north-west corner had worn through, and Maud Pellow held it up to the lamp as if the paper might tell her where Corran had gone. Her brother had sailed on the Halcyon with nothing but a pencil, a tin of biscuits and a compass his father had bought off a drowned man in Penzance. The needle still swung true, she told the harbourmaster, and he had nodded the way men nod at widows.

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The letter came in March, pinned under a stone on the quay at Scilly, and it was written on the back of a tide table. He had found an island with no name on any chart, he wrote, a low green hump where the currents turned back on themselves. The islanders kept a rose of dots and rays painted on their doorposts, and when he asked what it meant they only pointed at the needle of his compass and laughed. He had learned their words for north and south, which were the same word said backwards.

Maud read it three times before she understood that the monogram at the centre of his drawing was not his initials but the island's name, written in the old hand the fishermen used for their nets. She took the father's compass from the drawer and turned it until the needle pointed down the length of the room, past the kettle and the door, toward the sea he had not come back from. Then she took up her coat, because the tide was turning and somebody had to show the way.