How to refer to a figure created by tikzpicture in paper body?

Question

I am relatively new with LaTeX. I created an image by

\begin{figure}
\begin{tikzpicture}
....
\end{figure}
\end{tikzpicture}

I just don't know how to refer it in paper body by \ref{compression}, but this command displays the subsection number instead of the figure number.

Answer 1

without any actual code this one's pretty hard to diagnose, but first and foremost i'd change the code you did include to

\begin{figure}
    \begin{tikzpicture}

    \end{tikzpicture}
    \caption{My Empty Figure}
    \label{compression}
\end{figure}

I'd say look at Figure~\ref{compression}, but there's nothing in it.

which should allow you to refer to compression in the text as i did.

EDIT:

added the needed caption, as egreg pointed out.