Black tribal-style compass rose tattoo with N, E, S and W letters on the upper back of a person with dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal compass rose on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink compass rose sits centred on the upper back, with its four points aligned to the letters N, E, S and W. The star is filled with bold solid shapes, swirls and interlocking circles in a tribal-inspired design. The tattoo is shown in sharp focus against pale skin, with the rest of the frame showing dark hair and a fleece top.

Back Compass Compass rose North East South West Letter Swirl

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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 chart table in the lamp room had been warped by forty winters of damp, and Edwin Marr laid his brass dividers across it anyway, because the inspector from Trinity House was due on the afternoon tide and the bearings had to be right. The old compass rose was painted on the floor of the gallery, worn to a ghost where boots had crossed it, and nobody had redone it since his father's time. Edwin had decided it was a lie that the north in the paint sat true to the north outside.

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He went out onto the gallery with the cheap pocket compass in his palm and the wind pulling at his collar. The needle swung and settled. Below him the Skerry rocks came up black through the foam, and beyond them the sea ran grey to a horizon that looked no different in any direction. He turned slowly, counting the bearings against the stone spokes of the painted star, and found that the swirls his mother had carved into the lintel above the door were pointing, very nearly, the same way as the sun in the morning.

The inspector came and went with a clipboard and a polite cough. Before he climbed back into the launch he looked up at the rose on the gallery floor, then at Edwin, then down again. "Keep the lamp lit," he said, "and keep the floor swept."

That evening Edwin scrubbed the paint until the north shone, though he left the swirls as they were. Ships steered by whatever was true, and he saw no harm in letting the light do the rest.