Traditional tattoo of a globe pierced by three arrows with red drops below, shaded in black, grey and red, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe pierced by arrows with blood drops

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A globe with continent outlines is pierced by three arrows from above and below, with red droplets falling beneath it. The bold black outlines are filled with black and grey shading on the globe and a red wash behind it, with yellow and orange arrow fletching. The tattoo is centred on a close-up of a leg against a dark background.

Traditional Calf Globe Arrow Blood drop Earth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Somebody painted the world on the stairwell wall of Kestrel Court in 1987, and every winter since, damp has crept in from the corner and eaten another piece of it. By the time I moved onto the ninth floor, Australia was mostly a rumour and the Atlantic had gone the colour of weak tea. Mr Adeyemi from flat 4 said it was a shame. Mrs Pryce from flat 2 said it was a disgrace and the council should be made to look at it.

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The council sent a letter in March saying the wall was under review. That was the month my brother Sol came back from Hull with a box of our dad's old sign-writing brushes and a tin of enamel gone thick and sticky. He said he'd watched a man in a shipyard pub repaint a whole hull with a stick of chalk and a wet sponge, and he didn't believe it either, but he wanted to try.

We worked three nights with the landing light buzzing. He did the outlines in black, careful as a surgeon, and I did the arrows, three from above and three from below, because Dad always said a thing looks truer when it's pinned from both sides. For the red wash we used the rust-coloured stain the damp had left behind it, and blended it in with a rag until the edges softened.

In the morning Mrs Pryce came out in her dressing gown, looked at it for a long time, and said nothing at all. Then she went back inside and left her door open, which in Kestrel Court is as close as anyone gets to applause.