Traditional style tattoo of a globe, flowers, leaves and a suitcase on a forearm, with the words Every path leads home.

Globe and suitcase with lettering on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A globe on a stand sits above a brown and red suitcase, framed by green leaves and red flowers, with small stars and a swirl. The words EVERY PATH above and LEADS HOME below are set in bold black lettering, with the top line curving across the design. Heavy black outlines define the shapes, with flat fills in green, red, yellow and orange.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Globe Flower Leaves Lettering Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on again, boy, and leave that hook alone. It's been dripping since Valparaiso and it'll drip till we're in dock. No, sit. You'll hear the tale better with your backside on a crate.

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See the globe above the stove, on its brass stand, with the sea painted the colour of weak tea? Ada Penrose gave me that the night before I first signed on. She kept a leather case under her bunk with her name stencilled on the lid in red. Forty years at sea and she never once unpacked it. Every port she'd buy a tin of something sweet, a length of ribbon, a postcard of some cathedral, and fold it into that case like she was storing up weather.

Then the owners sold the Maud Ellery for scrap in Hull, and Ada came ashore with the case on her shoulder. She stood in the rain at the dockgate and I asked her where she'd go now. She spun the globe with one finger, quick, the way you'd spin a barrel, and let it stop where it liked. It stopped on the Shetlands. She laughed like a gull and said the thing had never once pointed her wrong, because every line she drew on it bent back to the same wet quay.

She took the first train north with the case and the globe under her arm. A postcard came from Lerwick in March, a harbour with boats like black beetles. On the back, in pencil, she'd written: Every path, Tom. The case is open on my table now. The kettle's gone cold, so put it on again.