Colour traditional tattoo on a forearm showing a globe, a grey VOYAGE banner, two pink and orange roses and green leaves.

Globe, roses and VOYAGE banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A globe on a stand sits at the centre of the design, with a grey ribbon banner reading VOYAGE across the top and two large red and orange roses above and below it. Bold black outlines define the petals, leaves and globe, with soft shading on the petals and a pale blue sea around the tan landmasses. Bright colour dominates the composition, which fills the forearm from wrist to elbow against a plain background.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Globe Banner Rose Leaves Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy's globe had lost its stand twice before Tamsin learned to carry it upright. Its sea was the pale blue of skimmed milk, and the land had gone the colour of toast where the varnish had worn through. Every Thursday Tamsin carried it up the lane from the post office to the cottage at the edge of Hollin Wood, because the old woman said a map was only worth having if somebody turned it.

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Tamsin turned it. She spun it under her palm and let her finger drop where it wanted, and Mrs Abernethy wrote the names in a ledger with a pen that scratched. Hollin. Arrow Rock. A town called Varda that Tamsin could not find on any other map in the house. Each name was a promise the wood had never made to anyone in the village.

The roses along the hedge came out in June, red at the heart and fading to peach at the rim. Tamsin cut one for the windowsill and found a letter tucked under the globe's brass foot. The hand was one she knew from the shop counter, and the postmark was from a harbour she had only ever spun past. Inside was a single line: the ship is in, come down and see her.

She folded the letter into her apron pocket and set the rose in a jar of water. At the stile she stopped and looked back once. The cottage window caught the afternoon, and the globe sat there in the glass, turning on its own slow axis, the blue sea facing the wood.