Black fine line tattoo of a world map outline with a compass rose beside it, on the side of the ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map and compass on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of a world map shows the continents of the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, with Australia at the lower right. A compass rose with the letters N, E, S and W sits beside the continents on the lower right. The linework is thin and uniform with no shading, and the skin is shown from the side with a black bra strap across the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Ribs World map Continent Compass Compass rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been drawing the world on the backs of dance tickets since March, mostly in the cloakroom of the Palais at Morecambe, where the coats hung in rows and nobody asked what the pencil marks were. Her father had charted the coast for the Admiralty before his eyes went, and he had taught her that no coastline is ever straight. You follow it with the nib, let the pen wander into every bay, and trust the sea to forgive you.

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On Saturday the band played a quickstep she could not follow, and Walter from the fish quay came over with two glasses of lemonade and asked what she was scribbling. She showed him the ticket. He traced the Americas with a bitten thumbnail and said it looked like a boot kicked across the Atlantic. She laughed and told him it was the wrong way up, that north was wherever the ceiling lamps hung, and that she had put a compass in the corner so nobody would get lost on the way to the ladies.

He asked where she meant to go. She pointed to the top of the paper, where Europe crowded against the edge, then drew a finger south over the blue-grey gap that stood for the Mediterranean. Her father had sailed that way twice, both times on ships that never came back up the Tyne. Walter folded the ticket once and slid it into the pocket of her cardigan. Keep the compass, he said, you'll need it more than the lemonade.