Large black-outlined world map tattoo across a person's back, with countries filled in colour, placed across the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large world map covers most of the upper back, with continents drawn in black linework and countries filled with flat colour. North America, South America, Australia, parts of Europe, Africa and China are coloured in green, purple, brown, magenta and orange, while many other countries are left as outlines. The map's edges curve across the shoulders and the photograph is taken from behind, centred on the back.

Back World map Continent Globe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo would not let me colour a country until I had shown him the border on the old plate. "Ink first, paint second," he said, tapping the copper with his pencil as if it might bite. The workshop above the cobbler's in Bristol smelled of linseed and wet paper, and for eleven years I had sat under the north window filling in continents with a brush the size of a moth's wing.

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The plates were older than both of us. Someone in 1921 had cut every coastline by hand, and the lines were still crisp enough to make a grown man feel careful. Kenya had been painted green since before my mother was born, but the sheet for the Soviet Union was a problem. The copper had pitted, and Mr Okonedo would not risk a colour that might be wrong by Friday. So the great northern block stayed bare. We sent it out with its outline and nothing else, and the customers in Leeds and Oslo wrote to ask why Russia had been left blank, as though it were our fault.

I kept a tin of ochre and one of violet in my apron pocket. On the last afternoon before the shop closed I coloured Australia purple, the same violet as the sweet shop's old wrappers, then Argentina, then the brown of tea-stained paper for China. Nobody checked. Years later Mr Okonedo found that sheet in the rack and never mentioned it, but he kept it flat on top of the cabinet, where he could see it from his desk.