Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a desk globe on the forearm, with stippled continents and hatched shading on the sphere and stand.

Globe tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A desk globe sits on the forearm, showing the outlines of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, with a curved meridian arm above the sphere. The continents are filled with fine stippled dots, while the globe, arm and wooden-style base use dense hatching and crosshatching for shading. The image is entirely black and grey against pale paper towel, with the globe centred and the stand angled toward the lower right.

Dotwork Forearm Globe Continent Map

Find an artist for this

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

Rain came through the north stair every evening, so you carried the globe down to the kitchen and set it on the flagstones near the hearth, where the last cook had kept her salt. The meridian arm had bent in a fall the year the roof went, and it snagged your sleeve whenever you turned the sphere. You turned it anyway. Each night the sea seemed a little further from where you remembered it, and you told yourself that was only the ink lifting from the stippling.

Keep reading

Lord Carrow had left the globe behind when he rode south with the last of the garrison, and the castle had kept it the way it kept everything, out of inertia and damp. Its stand was cracked along one carved step, though the lowest ring still carried its painted bands of tiny triangles. You knew the continents by touch as much as sight: the thick knuckle of Africa, the bite of the Mediterranean, the scatter of islands where a dot had been pressed so often it had nearly worn through the paper.

On the last clear night you climbed to the library, where the floor had gone and the shelves hung out over empty air, and you found the chart of the coast scratched on the wall in charcoal. It was wrong by a single bay. You took the globe up in both arms, rested it on the sill, and turned it until that bay sat under your thumb. Then you carried it back down the stair one step at a time.

At dawn you wrapped the globe in its sailcloth and left it on the kitchen table, facing the door, with the cracked stand toward the hearth. Whoever came next would find Africa under the lamp and the sea where it ought to be. You took the road south with an empty satchel and a thumb that still knew the way.