Black and white photo of a fine line world map outline tattoo across a person's upper back.

World map outline on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of the world map, showing the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, is tattooed across the skin. The linework is thin, dark and even, with no shading inside the shapes, leaving the continents as open outlines. The monochrome photograph is framed close, with the map filling most of the frame and soft shadow falling across the lower right.

Fine line Back World map Continent Globe Travel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the gap in the tarpaulin again, and Marek Dunne tipped his tin bucket so it ran off the corner rather than across the maps. Along Cattle Market Row the other stalls were folding their trestles. He stayed, because the girl who had visited on Thursday had said she would come back for the one with no writing on it.

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She arrived at half past four with a carrier bag and wet hair, and unfolded a sheet of tracing paper on his table. It was an outline of the whole world, drawn in pencil, every coastline rubbed out and drawn again. 'My nan traced this from an atlas she couldn't afford,' she said. 'She wanted the edges without the lies. No capitals, no borders.' Marek turned the paper toward the lamp and saw that she had gone round Hudson Bay twice, as if she had been afraid of losing it.

He had a fine-liner in his coat pocket, the kind he used for touching up old engravings. He laid the tracing over a blank print and went round the shapes slowly, lifting the nib at each island, so that Australia stood alone at the bottom of the sheet like something set down to dry. The rain thickened. Somewhere behind them a van door slammed and a man shouted about pallets.

When he finished, she held the print up and studied the Atlantic, the wide empty strip between the two great shoulders of land. 'Nobody's written anything there,' she said, and he said that was the good part. She paid him in coins, folded the sheet into her bag, and walked off into the wet without looking back, leaving the blank water for him to keep.