Black and grey design of a compass rose with overlapping riveted metal rings and a single Chinese character at its centre.

Riveted compass rose with kanji centre

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A four-point compass rose sits at the centre of several overlapping metal rings studded with rivets, with a single Chinese character placed in the middle. The linework is clean and the rings and points are shaded with smooth greys and highlights to suggest polished metal. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background and is centred in the frame.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Ring Rivet Metal Chinese character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rivets were still warm when I carried the ring plates down the slip at the yard, counting them under my breath the way my father taught me. Thirty-two to a hoop. Three hoops, one for each bad winter, he said, though he never once told me which winters.

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He worked the riveting gun on the hulls for twenty-six years, and his hands never stopped trembling after the day the boiler went at the Clydeside works. The compass rose was his idea. He drew it on the back of a freight manifest the night before the launch, four points sharp as fishhooks, with rings crossed through them like a sailor's knot. At the centre he copied a single character from a letter that had come from Yokohama, in a hand he never learned to read. "Musume," he said, tapping it with his pencil. "Daughter. It's the one who finds the way back." I could read it well enough. I didn't correct him.

The Maid went down the ways in the rain, and the men cheered until the water took her weight. I climbed the gantry afterwards and pressed the last rivet into the outer ring myself, because his fingers would not hold the gun steady. It was the only one that never leaked.

He died the next March, the week the swallows came back to the yard. The drawing hangs in my kitchen now, framed in tin, and when the lamp is lit the rivets catch the light in a row of small bright eyes. The needle has long since rusted off the back of it. I have never once needed it to tell me which way is home.