Small compass rose on a shoulder blade
Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo
A small compass rose sits on the upper back, near the shoulder blade, with its cardinal points labelled N, E, S and W. The design is drawn in solid black ink with bold outlines and fine radiating points. The background is a blurred waterfall and river, and the woman wears a blue bikini top.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The surveyor came back from the Sallow Falls with split boots and no map. The king had sent him north with three good sheets of vellum and a brass needle, and he returned with nothing but a sunburnt face and a tale about a girl who would not give her name.
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She lived in a hut behind the mill wheel, where the spray never quite dried on the walls. Her father had been the king's cartographer until the river took his boat, and she kept his instruments in a sack that smelled of tar. When the surveyor asked how she knew the way to the ford, she only pointed at the falls. Water poured over the ledge in a long white curtain, and below it, cut into the flat grey rock, lay a compass rose the size of a cartwheel. Its points were true. Its letters had been worn to ghosts by a hundred winters.
"The rock remembers north," she said, "so long as someone reminds it." Every dawn she climbed down the wet ledge with a chisel and a dish of charcoal, and she gouged the eight points back into the stone one shallow stroke at a time, while the river tried to carry them off.
The king never got his maps. Instead the people of Carrow took to walking to the falls at first light and standing where the shadow of the rose fell across the water, so that they always knew which way home lay.
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