Large realism back tattoo in black and grey showing an Africa map, two winged angels, a compass and portraits, with a red and grey Liverpool crest on the upper arm sleeve.

Africa map and angels back piece

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece combines a detailed map of Africa with a city plan, two winged angel figures, a compass, a sailing ship and several framed portrait photographs set at angled positions. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, creating a layered, collage-like effect in mostly black and grey ink. Red ink appears on the arm sleeve, where a football club crest sits alongside the back piece, and a small national flag on the map also carries colour.

Realism Back Upper arm Map Africa Angel Compass Ship Portrait Flag Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was already soft at the folds when Nan pressed it into my hands at Tilbury, and she said the Cape would wear the corners off it before I got there. I didn't believe her. Nobody at nineteen believes a piece of paper can wear out, not when it has a compass rose the size of a dinner plate and a small ship sitting off the coast as though it were waiting for someone.

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Thirty-one days out, the Ada Lenz rolled through the Roaring Forties with everything lashed down, and I spent my watches in the chart room with a pencil, tracing our wake. The second mate, a Gdańsk man called Piotr who had made the run eleven times, watched me do it for a week without a word. Then one night, with the glass falling and the lamp swinging on its hook, he unpinned a curled square of photograph from behind the barometer, three men squinting at a harbour wall, and said that every chart is really a list of places somebody was afraid of.

We raised the coast on a grey morning with the wind backing round, the land coming up out of the spray the colour of wet slate. I laid Nan's chart flat on the table and weighted its corners with the brass dividers. Her faint pencil dots were still there beside the Cape, and under them, in her small upright hand, the words wait for the light.

I wrote beneath them, in my own hand, the date and the word home. Then I folded the chart along its old creases so it would fit back in my kitbag. Piotr watched me do it from the doorway, nodded once, and looked out at the fog, where the ship's bell was striking eight.