Black and grey fine line tattoo of a compass rose, world map outline and passport stamps across a woman's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and world map on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose sits on the upper back with dotted bearing lines radiating from it, beside an outlined world map and two passport-style stamps on the shoulder. The linework is fine and sketchy, with soft grey wash and stippled shading that gives the map its faded, worn look. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills the left side of the frame against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Shoulder Back Compass rose World map Compass Dotted line Travel

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the chair won't bite. You want the long story or the short one? The short one is that the road out past Corran Wells runs a hundred and forty miles without a bend, and a man once drove it with a map he'd bought in Lisbon forty years before the tarmac got there. The map was wrong about everything except the coast, and he never forgave it.

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Here's the part they tell wrong. He didn't want the map to be right. He wanted it to be a map of somewhere he had been, so he took a pen and a jar of blue ink and went over every line of it, the rivers, the borders that had moved, the little dotted bearings his father had drawn to show the way home. Every stamp he collected at a border post he pressed into the margin, Marrakesh, Ushuaia, a town in Tasmania that doesn't exist any more, until the paper was more ink than land.

The night he ran dry, a girl in a yellow coat walked out of the dark with a torch and a tin of sardines. She looked at the compass rose on his map, eight points shaded in grey, and said, that one's pointing north from the wrong side of the world. He laughed so hard he had to sit on the bonnet. She showed him how to find the Plough by following the dotted lines, and by first light the road had bent for the first time in his life.