Traditional colour tattoo of a globe on a stand with an orange flower, black leaves and the words WHEN I COME AROUND, on a limb.

Globe with flower and lettering

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a blue globe on a stand, with a world map shown in brown and orange, a large orange flower and black leaves to the left. The words WHEN I COME AROUND curve across the upper right in black capitals. Bold black outlines, flat orange and yellow fills and blue shading give it a classic, graphic look on a limb.

Traditional Other Globe World map Flower Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the ovens lit by four, the way her father had taught her, and by half past she had the first tray of bloomers cooling on the marble. The shop still smelled of yesterday's rye. On the windowsill sat the old globe Ray had bought from a Margate junk shop the summer before he left, its stand scorched on one side where someone had once set a hot tin down.

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She turned it with one finger and watched the blue seas slide past. Ray had never sent a postcard from anywhere that wasn't a harbour. Ports, he wrote, not places. Lisbon, then Valparaiso, then a line about a cook in Durban who made bread with mango in it, which Nell had tried and not liked at all.

The bell over the door rang at ten to five, far too early for customers. A man in a wet wool coat stood there holding a canvas bag, and he looked at the globe before he looked at her. "Still spinning, then," he said. She pushed the tray towards the window, where the sky over the car park was turning the colour of weak tea. "You said you'd come round," she said. "You never said which way."

He laughed, and it was Ray's laugh, only older and rougher at the edges. He set the bag on the counter and it clinked. Inside were two bottles of something foreign and a folded map, its creases gone soft as cloth. "Round is round," he said. "Now shut up and cut me a slice before I fall over."