Black blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a gridded globe with birds flying off it, placed on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Globe with flying birds on a shoulder

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a gridded globe sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with the continents filled in solid black. The globe's edges break up into fine dots and spray, and a flock of small birds lifts away towards the top right. The image is in black and grey against a pink top and a beige bra strap, shot at close range with a plain wall behind.

Blackwork Dotwork Shoulder Globe World map Continent Bird Flock

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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

Every winter the men of Harrow Fen drew the world on a board in the back room of the inn, because nobody in the fen had ever seen the sea and they wanted to know where it went. Old Mabry Stowe drew it best. She shaded the land in soot and left the water bare, and she would never say why.

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When the miller's son asked her to make a globe for his wedding, she took a month over it. She turned a beechwood ball on a peg and scored the lines into it with a hot nail, every line a road she had never walked. Then she blacked out the lands with ink, the hills and the deserts and the cold top where the lamps never went out, and left the grid showing thin between them like the furrows of a plough.

On the wedding morning the bride, Ada, would not let the globe sit on the trestle table. She carried it out to the field behind the church and held it up to the wires, where a crowd of small birds had gathered to watch the feast. They came down one by one and perched on the rim, a hundred of them, until the whole ball was ringed with feathers.

Then she tapped the wood, and the ink lifted off in a fine grey spray, and every continent broke into dust and went up with the wings. The fen folk said afterwards it was only the wind. Mabry Stowe said nothing at all, but that winter she drew no maps. She drew birds, and she left the sea bare on every page.