The spin-resolved density of states of Co atoms on a noncollinear magnetic support displays a distinct shape contrast, which is superimposed on the regular height contrast in spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy. The apparent atom height follows the well-known cosine dependence on the angle formed by the tip and adatom local magnetization directions, whereas the shape contrast exhibits a sine dependence. We explain this effect in terms of a noncollinear spin density induced by the substrate, which in our case is the spin spiral of the Mn monolayer on W(110). The two independent contrast channels, apparent height and shape, are identified with the Co magnetization projections onto two orthogonal axes. As a result, all components of the overall atom magnetic moment vector can be determined with a single spin-sensitive tip in the absence of an external magnetic field. This result should be general for any atom deposited on noncollinear magnetic layers. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.93.125424The control of the spin degree of freedom down to the single-atom limit is nowadays a central research issue [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], fostered by the increasing need for miniaturization and lowering power consumption in communication technologies. The most suitable technique to address the problem is spinpolarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM) [8], which has proven to be an excellent tool to perform single-atom magnetometry [1,6]. The design of magnetic structures with a given functionality calls for atomic-scale engineering by means of atomic manipulation or self-assembly of lowdimensional structures. Both of them can be combined with SP-STM [6,7,9,10]. For that reason, getting insight into the underlying physics of SP-STM and extending its range of applications is of crucial relevance. The SP-STM principle is the magneto-conductance effect in magnetic tunnel junctions [8,[11][12][13][14], and relies on probing the imbalance between majority and minority spins in the local density of states (LDOS) with respect to a particular magnetic quantization axis. Following the same notation as in Ref. [15], the spinpolarized tunneling current at sample bias V readswhere ρ T and P T are the tip's density of states and spin polarization,ρ s andm s the integrated sample total density of states and magnetization at r (tip position), and θ the angle formed between the tip and local sample magnetization. As a consequence, a SP-STM tip is only sensitive to the projection onto its magnetization direction, m s cos θ , and not to all other components ofm s . Here we show that the situation is radically different if the substrate's magnetic ground state is noncollinear within the spatial extent of an atomic wave function. Owing to the breaking of translational symmetry in spin space associated with the noncollinearity, the atoms' apparent shapes become distorted in spin-resolved STM images. We find that the strength of such distortion provides a quantitative measurement of the total spin component orthogonal to the default sensitivity direct...