A new technique has been developed to measure the wall shear stress and its direction in a turbulent boundary layer. This technique involves the measurement of torque upon a very small cylindrical body placed above the wall deep in the viscous sublayer, so that the device is operating in the creeping flow regime. The approach has involved calibration tests on a gauge 8 mm long by 0.8 mm in diameter, located in uniform shearing flow of glycerol created in a cone-and-plate apparatus. Our theoretical, computational and experimental results show that the torque has a linear relation with the wall shear stress. We have used a spectral element code, Nekton, for determining the creeping flow about the gauge. There is a very good agreement between the experimental and computational results.