Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind, with a fine line outline tattoo of the world map across her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map outline across a upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long dark hair is seen from behind, her face turned away from the camera, with bare shoulders and upper back. A thin, single-line outline of the world map covers the middle of her back, showing the continents of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The photograph is black and white against a patterned wallpaper of climbing flowers, which makes the dark ink stand out clearly.

Fine line Back World map Continent Outline Map Woman Back

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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

My dearest Anselm, the chart you sent from Lisbon arrived water-stained and folded into a bird, but I could read every coastline through the damp. You were right about the western sea. It is wider than Ptolemy allowed, and the sailors who row out past the last fishing stakes come back grey-lipped and swearing they felt the water lean. I have pinned your outline of the Atlantic above my desk, the ink still fresh enough to smudge under my thumb.

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The Guild wants the whole world drawn on a single sheet by midsummer, every shore set down in one unbroken line so that a merchant can run his finger from Cadiz to Canton without lifting it. Master Ruel says it cannot be done without lying somewhere. I told him the lie is in the rivers, which keep wandering, and the coast is honest enough if you trace it slowly. He laughed and set me to the southern continent, which nobody has seen except in the stories of the parrot-keepers at the docks.

I have been drawing it with a stylus dipped in lamp black, one stroke at a time, and each morning I find the line has crept a finger's width further south than the night before. I have not told Ruel. Yesterday I walked to the harbour to check the tide tables and found a girl with a basket of salt fish standing exactly where the coast should curve. She asked me what I was measuring. I told her the edge of things. She said she had always supposed the edge was just where people stopped looking. Write soon, and tell me whether the tide has ever turned back on you.