Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a globe showing continents and latitude lines, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Stippled globe on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A globe with continents and latitude and longitude lines is shown in fine black stippling. Shading is built from dots that create soft grey tones across the landmasses and the sphere's edge. The circle sits centrally on pale skin, with dark fabric at the left edge and a partial cursive script tattoo cropped at the right.

Dotwork Back Globe World map Continent Script

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 schoolmaster's globe has a crack running from Lisbon to the Caspian, and you are the only one in Tylorstown who has been allowed to touch it. Mr Pryce keeps it under a glass dome on the reading room windowsill, out of the coal dust that rolls in every time the cage hits the bottom of the shaft at six. He lets you dust it on Thursdays, and you have learned to hold it by the iron axle, never the painted sphere, the way he taught you.

Keep reading

Your father went down the Lewis pit at fourteen and came up at forty with a cough and a pension. He wants you on the surface, in the office with the ledgers, where your hands stay clean. But on Thursdays you sit with the globe, a nib pen and a pot of Indian ink, and you make it again one dot at a time, because the printed version in the almanac has lost the desert and you cannot bear it. Each dot takes a breath. Dense where the sea runs darkest, sparse where the land is bright, so the grey settles over the paper like weather.

The week the company posts the notice about the new seam at Ferndale, Mr Pryce finds you at the windowsill with the pen still wet. He does not scold. He turns the globe until your finger lands on a place none of the men have ever mentioned, a long thin coast where the dots are thickest. "Ships go there," he says, "for people who do not come back the same. Go and look at it before the lamps decide for you." You fold the drawing into your coat pocket, where it stays dry all the way down the hill.