Fine line black and grey tattoo of a globe with a watercolour world map, an arrow and a geometric crystal on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe, arrow and crystal on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a wireframe globe sits centred on the upper back, with a soft grey wash showing continents across its upper half. Beneath it, a faceted crystal or iceberg shape is drawn in fine lines, and a vertical arrow and horizontal compass-style line cross through the globe. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain light background, with the wearer's head and face cropped out of frame.

Fine line Geometric Back Globe World map Arrow Compass Crystal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had the chart spread across the cabin table, weighted at the corners with a tin of tea, a spanner and two mugs gone cold, when the ice began to talk against the hull. It was the wrong month for it. The Wey had frozen over at the lock gates three nights running, and the barge Patience sat fast in the cut below Brentford with her coal unsold.

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Her father had drawn the chart himself, years back, in pencil on the back of a brewery calendar. Not the canals, which any lockkeeper could tell you, but the other thing: the way the water moved under the ice where the pilings sank and the current pushed out in sheets like cut glass. He had marked it with a small arrow pointing north-east and written beside it, in his square capitals, GO ON THE SHADOW SIDE.

Mae hadn't understood it until the third night, when the moon came round low over the water and she saw the ice break into facets, pale and angled, each one catching light from a different direction. The shadow side was the one the sun never touched. She took the pole, set the bow against the flat grey shelf, and let the barge find its own line through the broken crystal toward the open reach.

By morning the Patience was moving. Behind them the locks iced shut and the gulls stood about on the towpath looking foolish. Mae rolled the chart up, snapped a rubber band around it, and tucked it under the bench where her father used to keep his boots.