Two views of a neo-trad style tattoo on the forearm showing an open mouth with teeth, with a blue globe showing Africa and Europe inside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open mouth with globe on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large open mouth with detailed teeth and a blue globe in the centre, with the land masses of Africa and Europe left in skin tone. The left view shows the mouth open and the right view shows it closed, with the lips and teeth shaded in black and grey. Blue ink dominates the globe, and the image has a plain green background with another tattoo visible at the top edge.

Neo-trad Forearm Mouth Teeth Lip Globe Africa

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Fell Stile for three days, and by the third night the only guest still awake was Mr Abel Quarrie, a globe salesman from Kendal who had come up to sell us one and stayed to sell us a story. He spun the brass-stand globe on the bar with one finger. "Water's easy," he said. "Blue is cheap. It's the land that gets argued over."

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My mother kept the till and I kept the fire. Quarrie talked about harbours whose names had been painted over twice, and about a ship he claimed he'd jumped from off the Bay of Biscay with nothing but a tin of boot polish and a borrowed compass. Each tale ended with him tapping the globe where a country ought to be, and each time the country had drifted a little further from where he'd said it was. My mother stopped correcting him around the second whisky.

On the fourth morning the plough came grinding up the lane and he paid for his room in coins that were not quite the right shape. He left a sheet of paper on the bar, a map of the parish in his own hand, with our inn marked as a small square with a row of dots along its edge, like teeth. "Keep the blue," he wrote underneath. "I'll take the rest."

The globe was still on the bar when we came down. Every drop of blue had been left where it was, the seas wet and bright, but the land had gone pale as clay, as if it had only ever been lent to the sea for safekeeping, and the stand was faintly warm, as though someone had been talking to it all night.