Black and grey fine line tattoo on the outer thigh showing an ornate triangle with a circle, swirling filigree and a vertical line, with the cursive word Always hanging below.

Ornate triangle and script on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the outer thigh shows a triangle enclosing a circle, with a vertical line through its centre and ornate scrolling filigree around the edges. A thin cursive word, Always, hangs from the base of the design. The linework is fine and even, and the shading is soft and restrained against the pale skin, with the photograph taken in black and white.

Fine line Geometric Thigh Triangle Circle Filigree Swirl Script Word Line

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last oil we have until Madeira. You want to know why old Hask never sold his compass when the rest of us sold everything. I'll tell you, though you'll not like the ending.

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Forty days out from Bristol, the Marigold ran into a calm so flat the sea looked like poured pewter. Nobody moved. The bosun, a Welshman called Iorwerth Pike, had a habit of counting rope when he was frightened, and he counted the same coil eleven times that week. Hask sat on the capstan with a dented brass ring in his lap, turning it over and over, and he said the wind would only come back for a man who knew what he was steering toward.

Nobody did. So on the fortieth night Hask took the ship's boy up the mast, where the stars lay thick as spilled salt, and showed him how the brass ring held a thin needle through its middle, with a little ornament of scrolled iron wound about the rim like ivy on a gatepost. The boy asked what the needle pointed at. Hask said, "Always. That's the word the old navigator scratched beside the blank square on the chart, the place nobody had ever sailed. It's the only word I ever trusted."

The wind came up before dawn, out of the west, sharp and sweet as cold apples. The Marigold limped into port with her sails in ribbons. Hask died in Lisbon with a cough and no money, and the boy kept the brass ring. Whenever he was lost after that, he'd take it out, sight along the needle, and say the word aloud until the sea gave him a heading. That was all the magic there ever was, and I'll thank you not to tell the bosun.