Line drawing of a black compass rose with rainbow watercolour splashes behind it, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Watercolour compass rose design

Geometric · Mixed · Flash

A black compass rose with an eight-point star and labelled N, S, E and W sits at the centre of the image, with a dotted circle and fine guide lines. Rainbow watercolour splashes in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink spread out from the centre and bleed past the linework. The design is on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Geometric Compass Compass rose Star Watercolour Rainbow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court had been out since Tuesday, so Ruth Okonedo carried the paint tins up nine flights with the brass compass under one arm. Her grandson had found it in a charity shop on the Mile End Road, its needle stuck and the glass cracked clean across the N. She had nailed it to the landing wall beside the extinguisher and a council notice about bin days, and every morning somebody stopped on the stairs to ask what it was for.

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The stairwell had not seen paint since the council sent a man with a roller years ago, and the walls had faded to the colour of wet cardboard. Ruth snapped a string line across the concrete at the top landing and drew the rose in fine black ink, eight points, a dotted ring, the cardinal letters in the careful capitals she had learnt sign-writing on a shopfront in Bow. Then she wet her brushes and let the colours go where they pleased: red and orange climbing toward the lift shaft, green seeping west towards the bins, blue pooling down toward the car park, purple and pink spilling over the ring.

Tomasz from flat 41 sat on the third step with a bag of crisps and watched the paint run. He was eleven and had been told he could stay only if he kept his hands in his pockets. 'It's going everywhere,' he said. 'That's the point,' Ruth said. 'A compass only tells you which way is which. It doesn't keep you on the page.' He wanted to know which colour was home. She admitted she had never been sure, and that she had painted her own front door green for thirty years.

When they finished, the paint had reached the bottom landing and crept under the door of the caretaker's cupboard. Tomasz pressed his palm to the blue at the foot of the wall and left a print. Ruth pinned the compass back beside the extinguisher, its needle still dead, and for the first time in weeks nobody asked her which way was north. They just went down the stairs, following the colours.