Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a thigh of a blue globe with green continents, surrounded by bright flowers, scrolls and a banner reading TRAVEL DISCOVER EXPLORE.

Globe, flowers and banner on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold, colourful globe sits at the centre of the design, with blue oceans, green landmasses and a fine grid of latitude and longitude lines. Thick black outlines frame the globe, large red, orange, pink and purple flowers with green leaves, and ornamental scrolls, with a pale ribbon banner across the lower half carrying the words TRAVEL DISCOVER EXPLORE. The photograph is taken straight on, with the design filling most of the frame and the skin lit evenly.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Globe World map Flower Leaves Scroll Banner Lettering Travel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The atlas was the only thing my grandfather would not sell when the colliery shut, so it sat on the sideboard in our terrace in Blaenau for the next nine years, its spine taped with brown parcel tape and its pages gone soft as cloth. My sister Carys said we should use it to prop the wobbly leg of the table. I said nothing, because I had already found the page with the Pacific on it and had been tracing the chain of little islands with my thumbnail since I was seven.

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The globe I bought from a catalogue at seventeen was nothing like that atlas. It was blue and green and wrapped in a grid so fine you could lose a finger in it, and when Mam saw it on the mantelpiece she asked if it was a lampshade. I told her it was a promise. She laughed the way she laughed at the telly, not really hearing, and went to put the kettle on.

The night before I left for the boat from Holyhead, I took the globe down, wrapped it in a jumper, and found Grandad in the back kitchen with his boots off, sat by the range with the atlas open across his knees. He did not look up. He ran his finger along a line of latitude and said, Thirty-one degrees south, son, that's where the wind never stops. Then he closed the book and put it in my hands. Take that, he said. Somebody ought to be lost with it.

I have it still, in a flat in Wellington with a view of the harbour. The spine finally split last winter, and I did not tape it. I just pressed the pages flat and let them dry out where the light falls.