Fine line black tattoo of a teepee with the word HOME beneath it, a crescent moon, a ringed planet and stars on the calf.

Teepee, planets and HOME on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black line tattoo shows a teepee with a dotted shaded flap, a crescent moon, a ringed planet, small stars and a dotted orbit line, with the word HOME in capitals below. The linework is fine and even, with dotwork shading on the tent flap and small patterned bands on the tent. The design is in black ink only and is centred on the lower leg against a plain pale skin background.

Fine line Dotwork Lettering Calf Tent Moon Planet Saturn Star Home Lettering Orbit Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's glass on the yard this time of year, and shift your chair nearer the range. Right. Ada Pym had a tent behind the byre that her father brought home from a Skegness fair the summer before the war, a teepee of painted canvas with a dotted flap that never quite closed. Nobody on the farm thought much of it until the snow came in November and Ada stopped coming in for her tea.

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Her mother went out with a storm lamp and found her inside, lying flat on the frozen grass with her boots off and her eyes on the flap. "What are you doing out here?" Ada pointed up through the open top, where the poles met in a point. "Going home," she said. "Not this one. The one on the moon. See the ring round Saturn? The crescent's standing guard over it." Her mother saw nothing but black sky and a scatter of hard stars above the hedge.

So Ada kept on. Each evening she lit a candle, sat in the warm pocket of the tent and counted the little stars: one, two, the bright one that looked like a pin. She said the dotted line was a path a person could walk if they were brave enough to leave the ground. Her mother thought it was a fever and sent for the doctor from Spilsby, who listened, nodded and said children grew out of planets.

The tent was still standing in March when the thaw came. Ada was not. Her mother lifted the flap and found only a candle stub and a note held down by a pebble. It said HOME, in capitals, and nothing else. Her mother left a lamp burning in that tent every night after that, and on clear nights, if you stand where she stood, the fourth star from the crescent blinks twice.