Large world map tattoo in black outline with selected countries filled in colour, covering the upper back.

World map across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large world map is tattooed across the upper back, with continents and national borders drawn in black outline. Several countries and regions, including parts of North and South America, Europe, Africa, China and Australia, are filled with flat colour in green, purple, yellow, orange and red. The image is taken from behind, showing the full width of the back, with the map following the shoulder blades.

Back World map 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

The coastline of Lisbon had been redrawn three times since the spring, and each time the ink bled a little further into the paper, so that by June the whole Atlantic looked like a bruise. Marisol Trent kept the copy on the chart table with a tin of cloves weighting one corner. She had promised the Admiralty clerk a clean sheet by Michaelmas, and instead she had a reef off Cabo Verde that moved every time the lamp was lit.

Keep reading

I write to you, Tobias, because you are the only man I know who will not laugh at a woman who measures the world with a knotted string. The borders are the trouble. Every colonel in every port insists his land runs one league further than the last, and I have begun to colour them in the hope that paint will settle what argument cannot. Green for the forests I have walked and the rivers I have sworn at. Purple for the mountains where the mules refused. Ochre for the Chinese provinces, which I was told I might not draw at all, so I drew them in the shade of a sealed letter.

The last thing I coloured was the red patch at the bottom of the Dark Continent, where the Zambezi thins into marsh. I did it with the boy's paintbox, and he watched me like a magistrate. When I finished he asked if the map would hold if he wiped the table with his sleeve. I told him that is the only honest test of any map I have ever drawn. Come home before the ink runs out.