Black line drawing of a vegvisir-style compass design with arrow-tipped staves and symbols, enclosed by a ring of runic characters, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vegvisir compass with runic ring

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical compass-like design with eight radiating staves, each decorated with small crossbars, circles and dotted terminals. A band of runic-style characters encircles the central motif within a double outline. The image is a single-colour black linework drawing on plain white with no shading.

Geometric Compass Rune Circle Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the windfalls, they bruise if you tread on them. Now. The old orchard at Hollin Scar was planted by a woman called Ragna Teesdale, who came over the moor the year the church bells were sold for lead, carrying a square of linen with a wheel drawn on it in ink. Every tree she set she ringed with stones. That wheel was how she found her way, you see, because her husband had gone out in February and the fog never lifted again.

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She swore the lines pointed true. Eight arms, each with its little crossbars and dotted ends, and round the rim the marks nobody in the valley could read. The vicar called it heathen nonsense. Ragna said it was only a map that didn't need a sun. When the mist came down thick over the rows that September, she would walk slowly with the linen held flat on her palm, turning until one arm lay along the church tower, and then she'd walk home.

Her boy Tobiah learned the arms by heart. The summer he turned twelve he drew the wheel on his own wrist with a sloe-ink pen, and one night a fog rolled off the beck so thick he couldn't find the gate. He held his wrist up, turned it till the longest arm pointed at the wall, and walked. He came out at the lane two fields over, muddy to the knee, laughing so hard he couldn't get his breath.

Ragna's husband never came home, and the tree he meant to plant that autumn still stands by the gate, bare of fruit. Tobiah kept the linen folded in his coat until the day he died, and he never once used it for himself. Now, pick up those windfalls. Mind the wasps.