Black and white photo of a small fine line outline of a globe showing continents, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small globe outline on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small circular globe is drawn in a single thin black outline, with simplified continents shown in the centre-right of the circle. The tattoo sits on smooth skin of an upper arm, photographed in black and white with soft natural light across the limb. The composition is close and centred on the tattoo, with plenty of plain skin around it.

Fine line Upper arm Globe Continent Map Outline

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

The rain had turned Oldham Street into a black mirror, and Ruth Calloway came up the stairs with a globe wrapped in a bin bag under one arm. Mr Pell didn't look up from his bench. He only nodded at the lamp and said the old ink had gone the colour of tea, so she'd have to take it back to the lines before the coastlines lost their nerve. The globe was fifty years old, its oceans chipped to bare plaster in places, its continents faded to the memory of continents.

Keep reading

She worked with a fine nib and a jar of ink that smelled of camphor. Europe came first, because Mr Pell said everybody checks Europe. Each coastline she traced was a small argument with the past: a bay here, a peninsula there, a river mouth he had once told her was drawn too wide by a man who had never seen it. Outside, the last tram rattled along the rails and went quiet. Somewhere below, a shutter came down with a bang that sounded like a full stop.

When she reached the Atlantic, she found a pencil line under the ink, faint as a vein, running from a coastline towards nothing. She asked whether it was his. He said it had been there when he bought the globe, and that he had never rubbed it out because it looked like someone had meant to go somewhere.

She finished the coast at four in the morning and set the globe in the window. The streetlight caught the drawn edges and left the sea blank and dark, the way it had been before anyone thought to name it. Ruth put her hand flat against the sphere and felt the faint give of the varnish, and she thought of the pencil line, still unfinished under everything.