Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe, butterfly and flowers on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style tattoo shows a grey shaded globe on a stand, with a woman's profile in black and red on its right side. A red and orange butterfly sits on the upper left of the globe, and red and orange flowers with dark leaves sit at the base and to the right. The bold black outlines and flat fills are set against smooth skin, with the design filling the frame.

Traditional Thigh Globe Woman Profile Butterfly Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Mariana Rose kept a globe in the galley, bolted to the shelf above the flour bins, because her grandmother had told her that a kitchen with the whole world in it would never run short of anything. It was grey with years of grease and the continents had gone soft at the edges. Every morning she wiped it with a damp cloth before she lit the range, and every morning she turned it a little, so that the sea came round to face the door.

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A boy named Tobias Quill came aboard at Falmouth with no people and no papers, only a paper butterfly folded from a page of his dead mother's letter. He ate standing up. The cook gave him bread crusts and told him nothing. When the ship ran into the doldrums and the water went green and still, the boy stopped eating altogether, and the cook sat on the stool beside him and told him about the flowers that grew on the far side of the globe, the red ones with dark leaves that looked like fire wrapped in a fist.

On the forty-first day the wind came back. The cook carried the globe up on deck and set it on the hatch cover, spinning it with one finger until the boy could find Falmouth, and then Cape Horn, and then a small green dot in the Pacific that she said was home. A butterfly the colour of rust lifted off the rail, circled twice, and settled on the top of the world, right over the place the cook had pointed to.

Tobias ate his supper that night. In the morning the cook found the paper butterfly tucked under the globe's base, its wings open to the sea.