Black and grey pencil sketch of a steampunk compass rose surrounded by interlocking cogs, levers and scrollwork flourishes, drawn as a tattoo design.

Steampunk compass with gears and flourishes

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a compass rose with N, E, S and W markings sits at the centre of a large ring of cogs. Smaller gears, curved levers and rivet details surround it, and scrolling leaf-like flourishes trail out from the left and bottom. The work is shaded in graphite greys with fine hatching and no colour.

Compass Compass rose Gear Cog Rivet Flourishes Leaves Scroll

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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

The winding engine at Hollin Pit stopped twice that week, and the men said it was the brass compass's fault. Old Tobias Renn kept it in the engine house on a nail above the boiler, a round thing with four letters cut around its face and a ring of cogs behind the glass. Nobody could say who had made it. The overman said it had come down the shaft in a dead man's coat.

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Tobias did not believe in ghosts, but he believed in gears, so he took the back off the compass with a bent spoon and a candle. Inside, a little brass rose was spinning loose on its pin, the points worn to nubs. He filed a new pivot from a carriage bolt and set the needle true. After that the cogs turned sweetly and the cage went up and down the shaft as it should.

On the Friday, a boy named Eli Dunne went back down the east drift for a lamp he had left, and the roof came in behind him. The air thickened and the flames bent low. The men shouted, but nobody could see their own hands. Tobias carried the compass down in the cage, held flat on his palm, and watched the needle swing and settle. North, he said, and they went north along the seam the needle pointed at, calling and listening, until a small voice called back out of the dark.

Eli came up at dawn with his lamp still lit and his face black to the ears. The compass went back on its nail, and the engine ran clean all summer. Long after the pit was closed and the wheel had rusted still, the needle in the engine house kept pointing north.