Colourful passport stamp designs and a compass rose tattoo in fine line style across the outer thigh.

Passport stamps and compass on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of overlapping passport stamps in green, blue, red and purple, with a black compass rose at the upper right and a small aeroplane outline near the bottom. The stamps have clean, thin outlines with simple lettering and dates, and the compass uses bolder black shading for its points. Colour ink dominates the stamps while black ink defines the compass and plane, set against bare skin and a blue fabric edge at the top left.

Fine line Thigh Compass rose Aeroplane Shamrock Date Travel

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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

Brenda from the Dublin desk says the shamrock stamp is a mistake, that nobody at Dublin Airport ever used a clover, but I have now seen it in three different hands and have decided it is a kind of signature. The green ink came out of the only tin left after the Madrid shipment went astray. I am writing this at the kitchen table with my reading glasses pushed up into my hair, a cold cup of tea beside the Heathrow pad, and a stack of old passports I rescued from the skip.

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Most of them are not mine to keep. Madrid, dated 31 November, which does not exist, so some clerk must have been bored that afternoon. A round black postmark from Green Bay, Wisconsin, 1991, smudged like a thumbprint on a window. A hissing aeroplane drawn in a single stroke, the sort of mark that means somebody's holiday went well. Heathrow, 30 December, in purple, pressed down hard by a man who wanted the ink to last until the new year.

The compass rose is the only thing on the page nobody stamped. My brother Desmond drew it in biro the night before he left for Perth, the points crowded in because he had run out of room. He told me a man who knows where north is can never be properly lost. I did not believe him until the morning I stood at a gate with the wrong form in my hand and no idea which way the queue was going.

Now I stamp the back of his letters, one place per postcard, so every line he sends me sits inside a border of somewhere else. Dublin's clover goes next to the word home. I think that is what he meant.