Red line drawing of a Vegvisir, an eight-armed Norse compass symbol, surrounded by a ring of runic characters on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vegvisir compass within a runic ring

Colour · Flash

A single-colour red line drawing of a Vegvisir, an eight-armed Norse compass symbol, with each arm ending in small forked or trident-like marks. The central emblem sits inside a bold circular border filled with angular runic characters. The linework is solid and even, with no shading, and the composition is symmetrical on a plain white background.

Compass Rune Circle Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent came down in a wet wind outside Hexham, and Oda Pirie had the brass compass in her apron pocket before anyone thought to look for it. It was a Norse thing, she said, eight arms ending in forks, pressed into the lid of a biscuit tin by a tinsmith who had never been further than Orkney. The old belief was that a traveller who carried it would never be lost in a blizzard. Nobody in the Dunmore Travelling Marvels had ever been lost in a blizzard. We had simply run out of towns that wanted us.

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Our lion had gone to a farm near Carlisle in the spring, in exchange for its feed. The high wire had rotted through over Christmas, and Dunmore would not pay a rigger to mend it. He talked all week about Bristol, where a fairground man had promised us a winter pitch on the harbour, and every evening he drew the route on the back of a playbill with a carpenter's pencil. Oda listened, then took out the compass and turned it on the table, thumb pressed to the glass, until the needle settled on whichever way she had already decided.

At the crossroads above Haltwhistle the needle would not settle at all. It shivered, swung, and pointed back the way we had come. Dunmore swore and wanted to take the left fork anyway. Oda climbed down from the wagon, set the tin on a flat stone beside the milestone, and tapped its lid so the arms stood up in the drizzle. "The rings round the edge are for finding home," she said. "The middle is only for going on."

We turned the horses north. When I looked back from the top of the rise, the tin was still there, catching rain in its forks, and Oda was sitting on the stone beside it with her hands in her lap, as if she were waiting for a train.