Black and grey tattoo of a bold letter G beside an outlined globe with shaded continents, on plain skin.

Letter G and globe tattoo

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A bold block letter G sits beside a circular globe outline. The globe shows the Americas and parts of Europe and Africa in soft grey shading. The ink is solid black for the letter and linework, with the composition sitting in a tight crop on plain skin.

Lettering Globe Continent Earth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The globe in the scriptorium at Saint Hallvard had been turned by so many thumbs that the Americas had gone smooth as river stone. Brother Tobias had spent eleven winters beside it, copying psalms by day and, by night, tracing the coastlines with a bent finger while the other monks snored in the dormitory below. When the spring thaw opened the pass, he went to the abbot, Matthias, and asked for leave to walk down to the sea.

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Matthias did not answer him. He took a scrap of vellum from his sleeve, dipped his pen, and wrote a single word in the big square letters used for the alms-roll. Then he pushed it across the desk. Tobias read it, took it to mean that his request was granted without ceremony, and went down the mountain that same morning with a loaf, a knife, and the scrap folded inside his tunic.

He walked for a long time. The sea at Genoa was grey and loud, and he stood at its edge with the slip of vellum in his hand and felt foolish. He sailed as a cook's boy to Lisbon, then south along the coast of Africa, and some years later his letters began to reach the mountain, each one describing a harbour the globe had shown him only as a dot. By the time he walked back up the pass, his beard was white and the valley was full of strangers who did not know his name.

Matthias had been dead for six years. In the scriptorium, the globe sat where it always had, and its smooth patches had changed. Beneath the place where the Atlantic met the Americas there was a new, rough groove, and the wood there was pale. Tobias set his thumb in it, and found that it fit.