Traditional style tattoo of a globe with a compass rose, a sailing ship and teal flowers with leaves on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe, compass and ship on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A globe sits at the centre of the design, with a compass rose on its lower left and a sailing ship on its upper right, surrounded by dark green leaves and a teal flower. The globe has bold outlines, fine latitude and longitude lines, and brown shading that gives it a rounded form. The colours are muted greens, teals, browns and tan, and the design fills most of the back of the hand.

Traditional Hand Globe Compass Ship Flower Leaves Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had been copying the same coastline for eleven winters when the abbot finally came down to the scriptorium and asked why the sea kept getting bigger on his maps. Osric did not look up. He was tracing the Gulf of Lyon with a goose quill, and the ink was still wet at the edge of the parchment.

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"Because I have never seen the edge of it," he said. "So I draw what the sailors tell me, and they lie about the distances, and I am too honest to correct them."

The abbot sat down on the bench beside him, which he had never done before, and said nothing for a long while. Outside, the bell for lauds began and stopped. At last he took a small brass compass from his sleeve, its needle worn bright at one end, and set it on the page. It had belonged to a fisherman's son who walked up the hill with a fever and died in the infirmary. Nobody knew what to do with it, so it had been kept in a drawer.

Osric wound the case three times in his palm, as if warming it. Then he drew a ship in the corner of the map, a square-rigged carrack with every sail full, and beneath it he wrote the boy's name in red. The abbot said that was not a sailor's custom. Osric agreed, and said the boy would have wanted the sea to be bigger than the monks thought, so that it had room for him.

In spring the new map went up in the chapter house, and the brothers said it was the first honest map in the valley. The compass rose sat in the lower corner, pointing at nothing in particular, and the needle stayed where Osric had left it.