Collage of three traditional tattoos: a woman's head with a pink rose, a globe with flowers and the words Home For Now, and a striped suitcase with an arm strapped across it.

Traditional collage: woman, globe and suitcase

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The collage shows three traditional-style tattoos on skin. The top left piece is a woman's profile framed by dark curls and a patterned headscarf, with a pink rose in front of her. The top right piece is a globe with red flowers and the words HOME FOR NOW, and the bottom piece is a striped suitcase with an arm strapped across it. All three use bold black outlines with bright red, yellow, green and blue fills.

Traditional Shoulder Upper arm Woman Rose Globe Flower Arm Headscarf Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trunk came up from the cellar of the Crown Hotel in Harwick the week the new boiler went in, its brass corners dull and its straps still buckled as if someone had only stepped out for milk. Mr Pell, who managed the place with a ledger and a grudge, wanted it sold at the auction for unclaimed luggage. The ticket tucked under the handle gave a platform, a date in 1931 and nothing else.

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Dora Vance, who had carried every other guest's bags up those stairs for eleven years, said she would open it first. The lock gave easily. Inside lay a red headscarf folded around a bundle of postcards, a pair of gloves no bigger than a child's hands, and a tin globe the size of an apple, its continents worn down to the metal. Every postcard showed a different harbour. Every one said the same thing on the back in pencil: still here, still here, still here.

Dora almost put them back. Then she saw the last card had her own name on it. It had not come from abroad. It had been posted from the Crown's front desk, in a hand she knew from twenty years of breakfast slips, and it said she should keep the globe for when the rest of them came home. The stamp was still on it, unpostmarked, as if the sender had decided against the walk to the box.

That evening Dora carried the trunk up to her attic room and sat on it with the scarf across her knees. Outside, the rain worked its way along the gutters toward the station. She set the little globe on the windowsill, turned it until Harwick faced her, and left the lid open a crack so that whatever the trunk was waiting for could find its way in.