Fine line and dotwork tattoo of a world map inside a dotted circle with a stippled compass star above it, placed on the upper back beside swallow tattoos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map and compass rose on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline world map sits inside a dotted circle, with small diamond shapes and tiny star marks around the edge. A stippled eight-point compass star rises above the map, shaded with dots while the map is drawn in clean single lines. Black ink only, shown on pale skin across the upper back, with grey swallow tattoos partly visible at the top left.

Fine line Dotwork Back World map Compass rose Globe Star Diamond Dot Swallow

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

Mind the pan, you great lump, and sit down before the stock goes over. Right. Now, the chart boy. Piet Harrow came aboard at Bristol with a box of pens and a head full of other people's coastlines, and Captain Dunmore set him to copy the world onto the galley bulkhead, because the paper charts were all water-stained and nobody trusted them.

Keep reading

Piet had one rule of his own. He would draw every coast in a single line, never lifting the pen, because a coast you have to stop and start is a coast you do not know. So the Americas came out first, then Africa hung off them by a thread, and all of Europe he managed in one wobble of ink that I still say looks like a sleeping dog.

The compass he would not draw with lines. He stippled it, dot by dot, perched on an upturned bucket while we rolled through the Western Approaches, because he said a star is only a star when you cannot quite see where it stops. Round the edge he set a ring of dots and little diamonds, one for every day a swallow had landed in our rigging, and a scatter of stars for the ports those birds had come from.

Then the captain came down and said the map was for the wall, not for dreaming, and told him to rub out the circle. Piet did not. He just pressed harder. Go on, look behind the flour bin tomorrow. The circle's still there, and so is the ink on his thumb.