Independently, Claytor [Ann. Math. 35 (1934), 809–835] and Thomassen [Combinatorica 24 (2004), 699–718] proved that a 2-connected, compact, locally connected metric space is homeomorphic to a subset of the sphere if and only if it does not contain K 5 or K 3;3. The “thumbtack space” consisting of a disc plus an arc attaching just at the centre of the disc shows the assumption of 2-connectedness cannot be dropped. In this work, we introduce “generalized thumbtacks” and show that a compact, locally connected metric space is homeomorphic to a subset of the sphere if and only if it does not contain K 5, K 3;3, or any generalized thumbtack, or the disjoint union of a sphere and a point.