Black and grey fine line tattoo of a globe with a latitude grid and soft shaded continents, with arrow lines extending outward, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Globe with compass arrows on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A globe is drawn in fine black linework with a crossing grid of latitude and longitude lines, and dotted points along the rim. Soft grey wash shading forms the continents, and long arrow-tipped lines extend outward in several directions like a compass. A printed stencil of the same design lies on dark fabric at the upper right, and the tattoo is shown in greys on pale skin.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Globe World map Continent Compass Arrow Stencil

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the grate, love, the damp gets into everything in this house. You'll have heard about Mr Pellow who took the back room the winter of the big gale. He came with a tin trunk and a drawing board and nothing else, and he paid his week in advance in silver, which in those days marked a man out.

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Every morning he walked to the end of the pier with his brass compass and a bundle of paper, and every night he came back with his cuffs grey from the spray and sat at the kitchen table drawing circles. Mrs Hobday swore he was trying to make the world. He told her he was only making a globe for the reading room at the Institute. But the lines kept sliding off the edge of the sheet, and he would curse under his breath and start again.

One February night the wind dropped and he came down to the parlour with a cup of cold tea and his drawing pinned with needles. The continents were wet ink, blurred where he had breathed on them. 'The trouble,' he said, 'is I've never once seen the whole of it at a time. I've only ever stood on a bit.' He tapped the grid of lines and the arrows that ran off the rim like the points of a star, each one pointing where he had been going and never gone.

He left on the morning tide without a forwarding address. Mrs Hobday found the drawing under his bed and pinned it up by the kitchen window, where it hangs still. Look at it closely. Every arrow points somewhere he wanted to go, and not one of them points home.