Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a globe cradled by two outstretched hands, placed across the chest below the breasts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe held by two hands on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A torso is shown with a black and grey tattoo of a globe held between two outstretched hands, with the continents shaded in stippled dots and the hands drawn in fine detail. The globe sits at the centre, with the hands reaching in from each side and fading into the skin, and paper tissue covers the breasts. The composition is symmetrical and centred, with a navel piercing and denim waistband visible at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Chest Globe Hand Earth Continent Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody else from Year Nine remembered Mr Hollis's geography room the way Dawn Pardoe did, so when the reunion dinner thinned out, I found myself in the car park of the Crown with her, both of us holding paper cups of warm white wine and pretending the cold was the reason we stood so close.

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She said it was the stippling that did it. Hollis had told us that shading continents with pencil made them look like bruises, so we had to build them out of dots. Dawn spent three lunchtimes on Africa alone with a biro, her wrist aching, while I drew the hands. Two hands reaching in from the edges of the page, copied from a postcard of a painting that lived in the art cupboard. I wanted them to look like they were lifting the world rather than holding it up. Dawn said I was showing off. She was right, and I think she knew I would never admit it.

I told her I had binned mine the week it came back with a C-minus and a note about proportion. She laughed, said she had kept hers, and dug into the pocket of her coat for a square of paper folded into eighths, soft as cloth along the creases. We opened it under the pub's yellow lamp. The dots had bled through from the back, so the oceans carried faint ghost-continents, and the hands looked more tired than I remembered, as if they had been holding the thing up for thirty years.

Dawn ran a thumb over Africa. A little grey dust came away on her skin, and she looked at it for a long moment before folding the paper back along its old lines and pressing it into my palm. You keep it, she said. You were always the one who could hold the world up without dropping it. I didn't tell her the smudge was still on my thumb when I got home.