Watercolour-style world map tattoo in bright colour washes across the ankles and tops of both feet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour world map across both feet

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A world map is tattooed across the ankles and tops of both feet, with the landmasses left as bare skin and their outlines picked out in fine dark lines. The oceans and surrounding areas are filled with soft, blended washes of red, pink, green, blue, yellow and purple that give a watercolour effect. The photograph is taken straight on against a black glossy surface, so the two feet fill the frame.

Ankle Other World map Continent Ocean Watercolour wash

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 map came out of the bread bin in January, folded into quarters and smelling faintly of paraffin. Mam had kept it there since the year the lambing shed burned, because it was the only dry paper on the farm. Nobody had unfolded it in my lifetime. I spread it across the kitchen table with the salt cellar on one corner and the mug of cold tea on the other, and the frost on the inside of the window made the whole thing seem to sweat.

Keep reading

Uncle Dai had painted it. He bought a tin of watercolours in Carmarthen the summer before he went to sea and never came back to finish the job. The continents were left bare, just pencil outlines he'd inked over with a crow quill, and he'd washed the oceans with whatever colours he had: a pink like the inside of a shell, a green for the Atlantic, a blue that had run into the Indian Ocean and dried in a tidemark. Where the Pacific should be he'd laid a violet so wet it had bled past the margin and onto the table cloth.

Tucked under the back flap was a note in his loose hand. Keep the edges wet and the land will show itself. I didn't understand it until I carried the kettle out to the trough and found the ice had skinned over again, and I had to break it with the heel of my boot. Standing there, I thought of him painting in the cold back room, dabbing at the sea and leaving the shore alone.

That night I pinned the map to the kitchen window with four clothes pegs and left the back door open a crack. By morning the frost had grown over the Pacific in white feathers and the blues had gone grey and stiff. The continents, which he had never painted, were the only places the cold could not get a grip on.