Traditional colour tattoo of a globe wrapped in a SISTER banner, with clasped hands, pink flowers and a red and white base, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe and clasped hands with SISTER banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a globe with green oceans and orange land masses, wrapped by a grey banner reading SISTER in outlined capitals. Clasped hands rest on a red, white and yellow triangle-patterned base below, with pink flowers and dark green leaves at the upper right and left. Bold black outlines and solid fills dominate, against a plain background of skin and a blue fabric edge.

Traditional Upper arm Globe Hand Banner Sister Flower Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Mind the globe, Dot, it's the only thing Dad left us that didn't need mending." Ruth had her coat buttoned to the neck before the kettle had boiled, and I was still hunting for my other glove when the taxi horn sounded outside the Co-op.

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The globe lived on the sideboard in our front room in Oldham, a tin-backed thing standing on a base painted like a fairground drum, red and white and yellow triangles faded to the colour of old barley sugar. Ruth had spent a whole winter tracing shipping lanes across it with a soft pencil. Australia had a thumbprint now, hers, pressed so hard over Adelaide that the paint had worn through to bare tin.

At Victoria station she gripped my hand the way Dad used to grip the tram rail, hard enough to hurt, and promised she would write from every port. The ship's name was painted on the funnel in letters taller than me, but I was too busy not crying to read it properly. Steam rolled along the platform like milk spilt on a counter.

She wrote eleven letters from the Red Sea and Colombo, and I kept every one in a biscuit tin under my bed. The twelfth came in March with a photograph of her on a dock, squinting, a stranger's hat tipped over her curls. On the back, in her looping hand: Your turn, Dot. Start saving. Every evening after the tea things, I turned the globe a little further round until Adelaide sat under the lamp, and I left it there.