Traditional tattoo on a calf showing an aeroplane over a globe, a WANDERLUST banner and a red rose with a dagger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Aeroplane, globe and rose calf tattoo

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A propeller aeroplane flies above a globe, with a WANDERLUST banner beneath it and a red rose with green leaves and a dagger below that. Small star accents surround the aeroplane and globe. Bold black outlines and solid fills define the design, with some shading on the globe and wings, and the tattoo is centred on the leg.

Traditional Calf Aeroplane Globe Banner Wanderlust Rose Dagger Star Leaves

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

The porridge had caught again, so I was scraping the pan when the old Dakota came low over the harbour at Lagos, its propeller flashing sun off the wing like a signal lamp. Every hand on the Marisol Dawn abandoned their work and ran to the rail. Not me. I had a rule about the rail: a cook who leaves his stove comes back to a scorched kettle and a mate who wants his dinner anyway.

Keep reading

Bosun Pell came banging down the companionway with his cap askew. He wanted a shilling on whether the plane was bound for Cape Town or Natal, and he wanted me to hold the stake, since I was the only man aboard who kept a proper ledger. I wrote the odds on the galley slate under the menu for Thursday's duff, then went back to my spoon. Pell called me a sour old stove-stoker. I let him.

What I didn't tell him was the atlas under the flour bin. It is a battered thing with the cover held on by string, and every port I have ever cooked in carries a pencilled star: Bergen, Halifax, Rangoon, a dozen more that are only names to anyone who has not stood on their quays with a basket of onions. I have never once been up in a plane. I have no wish to be. But the sound of that engine going south over the water made me reach for the pencil.

When the others came back grinning, Pell had lost his shilling and I had won my bet with myself. I found the star at Lagos, drew a thin line down the coast toward the Cape, and made a small new star at its end. Then I went back to the porridge, which was past saving, and ate it standing up with the pan still warm, while the last of the engine noise went on without me.