Fine line black outline of the world map tattooed across a person's upper back and left shoulder blade, with dark hair falling over the right side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map outline across upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back is shown from behind, with long dark hair falling over the right side. A black outline tattoo of the world map covers the shoulder blade area, showing continents such as Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia as thin unshaded lines. The image is in colour, with the black linework standing out against the pale skin.

Fine line Back World map Continent Map Outline Africa

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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

The ferryman at Tall Reed asked every traveller the same question before the pole touched mud: where is your coast? Most gave him a town, a river, a cousin's farm. Oswin Vael gave him a whole sea, and the ferryman laughed until he coughed and said that was not a coast, that was a sum.

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Oswin had walked out of the river towns with a roll of vellum and a pen that leaked. The vellum kept drinking the rain, so at each fire after that he drew the lands on his own back instead, with a borrowed needle and a pot of soot ink. By the marsh he carried the Americas across one shoulder blade, the great southern land on the other, and a crumpled Europe he had got wrong twice and refused to scrub away.

The ferryman made him turn and studied the lines by lantern light. He tapped the long curl of a continent and named its harbours, correct to the last cove. Then he stopped at a scatter of small islands near the rising sun. 'Who taught you these?' Oswin said his sister had sailed them once and drawn them from memory on a wet cloth, and that she had come home saying nobody believed her. The ferryman grunted. 'Then they are real enough to charge you for.'

He asked for nothing in the end. He poled Oswin across with the lantern held out over the water, and halfway over the lines on Oswin's back began to ache, like a bruise settling. On the far bank the ferryman pushed off without looking back, and Oswin felt the islands sink into him one by one, the way a sister's cloth dries in the sun.