Colour tattoo of the Australian continent filled with the Australian flag, with the Union Jack and white Southern Cross stars, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Australia map with flag on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of the Australian continent filled with the Australian flag, including the Union Jack in the upper left corner and stars of the Southern Cross in pink and white. Solid blue fills the landmass and the shading is smooth, with bold outlines around the map and clean edges on the flag elements. The design sits on the outer upper arm against a plain, slightly warm skin tone, with a light t-shirt sleeve and a wall socket visible in the background.

Upper arm Map Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tregear wanted the whole of Australia cut out of the flag and sewn down by Friday, because her boy's ship was due into Falmouth on the Saturday morning tide and she meant him to see it from the quay. I had the loft to myself that week. The other lads had gone round to Padstow for the pilot cutters, so it was only me, the smell of hot tar from the slipway, and a bolt of blue wool bunting that had been in the rafters since the Jubilee.

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I pinned the outline from a school atlas she'd brought in, a page soft as bread, and cut the continent freehand with the old brass shears. The Union Jack went in the top corner where it belonged, its cross set square. The stars were the trouble. She wanted the Southern Cross laid out exactly as it hangs over the water in the south, and I told her that from our side of the world it would sit upside down, all the wrong way up.

She didn't laugh. She said her son had written that the sky over Melbourne made him feel like a boy who'd climbed out of a window, and she wanted him to see it the right way round even if it cost her the view of him. So I stitched the pink and white stars where she pointed, one at a time, with waxed thread and a hand that wasn't steady.

On Saturday I watched from the wall as the ship came round Pendennis Point with her flags out. Mrs Tregear was already at the quay with the cloth folded over her arm, and when the gangway came down she shook it open against the grey morning, the continent full of blue and the stars burning pink across it, and I thought she looked less like a mother than a navigator who had finally found land.