Black blackwork tattoo of an eight-spoked runic compass symbol across the side of a ribcage, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vegvisir compass on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black compass-style symbol with eight radiating arms, each ending in angular runic marks, sits centred on the side of the ribs. The linework is solid and even, with the design filled in by dense black ink and no shading or colour. The photograph is black and white and frames the tattoo centrally against plain skin.

Blackwork Ribs Compass Rune Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hild, the wheelhouse lamp has blown out twice since Sunday and I have stopped trying to relight it. The sea is coming over the rail in grey sheets, and the mainsail went at dawn with a crack like a musket. I am writing this on the back of the tide tables because paper is the only dry thing aboard. Jon keeps asking what I am scratching at. I tell him it is a prayer. It is a compass, the one your grandfather drew on the lid of my sea chest the winter you were born, eight arms with the old marks cut between them, and I have never once trusted it to point north.

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Yesterday I trusted it anyway. With no stars and no sun, I put the helm over to whichever arm pointed most steadily through the spray, and we ran before it for six hours with the water at our knees. Jon swore the thing was foolishness. Then the cloud split above a black shoulder of rock, and there was a light in a window, low and yellow, exactly where the arm had been pointing all along. Nobody I know has ever kept a lamp lit on that headland. Nobody but you.

We did not make the harbour. We struck the reef at the mouth of Skarfvik and the boat is gone, but Jon and I came ashore on a hatch cover with the chest lashed to it, and the drawing on its lid was still sharp under the salt. I think you have been up there every night since the autumn, looking at the same eight arms and keeping the flame steady for men who were never meant to see it. Light the lamp again. I am walking towards it now.