Black and grey fine line tattoo of a world map with a compass rose and arrows, placed on the ankle and lower leg.

World map and compass on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey world map sits at the centre of the design, with continents shaded in soft grey washes and small dots for islands. Thin fine linework forms a compass with a circle, dotted arcs and several arrows radiating outwards across the skin. The tattoo is shown on a bare lower leg and ankle against a dark background, with no colour ink used.

Fine line Ankle World map Compass Arrow Circle Continent Globe Island

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke. No, the old chart does not show Skerra. The Admiralty men drew it out of the sea in their blue ink and forgot it, and that is how we like it. Now. Your grandfather's grandfather had a brass compass that his own father had carried off a Dutch ship. Every arm of it was a different road. North took you to the cold ice, south to the fat fishing grounds past the Azores, and the others pointed at places nobody on this rock had ever spelt right.

Keep reading

Duncan Mhor, who kept the lighthouse before it went automatic, bet the whole village he could walk the compass round the world without a single arrow pulling him home. He carried the thing in a tin box, and each night he drew a dot on the back of a flour sack where he had slept. Dots turned to a ring. The ring turned to a coast. By the autumn his sack was the shape of every continent the teachers had ever pointed at, drawn in charcoal and shaded with his thumb where the ink had run.

He came back in March, thinner, with his boots worn through to the sock. He laid the sack on the kitchen table and the whole kitchen went quiet, because the dots had come round in a circle and ended right on top of Skerra, a speck smaller than the rest. The needle, when he opened the box, was pointing straight down at the floor. Not north. Down, at the flagstones, as if the island were the thing it had been looking for all along.

So that is why we keep the lamp lit, and why none of you should go to sea until you can find your way back by the stars alone.