Colour traditional tattoo of a snow globe showing a red sun over mountains and a lake, with the words I WISH I COULD STAY HERE above and below, on the forearm.

Snow globe with mountains and sunset on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A snow globe scene sits within a circle, showing a red sun setting behind dark mountains, with a lake reflecting the orange and red sky and pine trees on either side. The bold black outlines and solid fills are typical of traditional work, and the words I WISH I COULD above and STAY HERE below are set in black block capitals. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with a striped base under the globe and a plain light background behind the limb.

Traditional Forearm Mountain Sunset Lake Pine tree Reflection Quote Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The globe arrived on the Tuesday post in a shoebox, wrapped in a Lancashire newspaper, with a note that said only: the lake's gone cloudy, can you see to it. Marjorie Leyland turned it slowly in her palms and watched the sunset slide across the glass. The red sun sat behind its black peaks exactly as it had in 1961, when her father bought it from the kiosk on Windermere pier for a shilling.

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She unscrewed the base with the little brass key that had lived in her apron pocket for decades. Inside, the water had gone the colour of weak tea, and the pine trees had sunk into a grey silt that smelled faintly of the seaside. She tipped it out and set the globe under the lamp. The lake, painted as one wavering stripe, had faded to almost nothing. Someone had loved it for a long time and then stopped looking.

She mixed distilled water with a pinch of glycerine, the way her father had shown her, and tested it against the back of her wrist. Then she took a pipette and began to draw the water back in, one drop at a time, matching the old reflections as if they were lines in a letter she had been asked to copy out. Outside, rain ran down Crown Street and the bus went past without stopping.

When the lid was sealed and she shook it, the flakes rose over the mountains, hung there, and settled, and the sun seemed to climb back out of the paint. She wrote the ticket in pencil: cloudy lake, cleaned, base reglued, collect when ready. Then, because it seemed a shame to send it back without a word, she added a line underneath in her neatest hand: it was still there, you only had to hold it up to the light.