Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black globe sits on the forearm, with the Americas on the left and parts of Europe, Africa and the Atlantic on the right. The continents are filled in with dense black ink and the ocean areas are left as bare skin, giving a bold silhouette. The circle is centred in the frame against a plain skin background with a dark fabric sleeve at the edge.

Forearm Globe World map Continent Earth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the sports hall of the old comprehensive, where the smell of floor polish had not changed in twenty-two years. Maureen Fairclough stood by the trestle table with a paper cup of squash and watched the room fill with people she had once passed notes to. She had not expected to see the globe.

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It sat on the stage beside the piano, where Mr Ledger had kept it for geography lessons. Someone had dragged it out of the caretaker's cupboard. The continents were still dark, worn to a shine where thirty years of children had pressed their thumbs on Africa and South America, while the seas had faded to a dull cream. Mr Ledger used to say the oceans were the only honest part of the world, because nobody ever bothered to claim them.

Maureen remembered the afternoon he caught her and Stephen Tully spinning the thing so hard that the Atlantic blurred into a grey smear. Stephen was at the far end of the hall now, balding and grinning, and he came over to ask whether she still had the atlas he had lent her in the fourth year. She said it was in the loft with her O level notes, and that she had never once looked at the pages about the Atlantic without thinking of him.

They crossed to the stage together and gave the globe a push. It slowed under their hands and stopped with the Atlantic facing the room, bare and bright, the Americas dark on one side and Europe and Africa dark on the other. Stephen laughed and said that was the bit they never got right. Maureen looked at the empty water between the two black shapes and said nothing, because for once he was right.