I got a compass tattoo and it points the wrong way
Eleven centimetres of very good linework across my left shoulder blade, commissioned on a Tuesday and structurally incorrect by the following spring.
I had wanted a compass rose since I was nineteen and had spent four years refining the brief, which by the end ran to two pages and included the phrase “quietly authoritative”.
Marek was patient about this. He redrew it three times. The final stencil was applied, checked in the mirror, photographed, and approved by me, in writing, at 14:20 on a Tuesday in March.
Five months later
My brother looked at it across a kitchen table in Woodbridge and said, without much ceremony, “Why is east on the left?”
The stencil had gone on face-down. Every point was correct in isolation and the whole thing was mirrored. North was still north — north is the one it lets you get right — but east and west had swapped, which on a compass rose is not a stylistic variation. It is simply wrong, permanently, in ink, on a person who had by then put “adventurous” on two separate dating profiles.
Marek was mortified. He offered to correct it free of charge, which would have meant reworking about sixty per cent of the linework and leaving the rest visibly denser. I said I would think about it.
I thought about it for four years.
In fairness it is a beautiful tattoo. The shading is genuinely excellent. It is simply a beautiful tattoo of a compass that would kill you.