Fine line black outline of the world map tattooed on the ribs, with a pink striped shirt lifted beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map outline tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black outline of the world map sits on the side of the ribcage, showing the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia as single-line shapes. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as dark against pale skin. The photograph is taken close up, with a hand holding a pink striped shirt aside at the top of the frame and a plain bed sheet at the left.

Fine line Ribs World map Continent Outline Map

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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 coastline on the paper was wrong again, and Marguerite had been correcting it since breakfast. She sat at the kitchen table in Hull with the Admiralty chart weighted down by a teapot and a tin of Bourbons, tracing Cape Horn with a sharpened pencil that kept snapping. Her brother had sent the sketch from Valparaíso three weeks ago, scribbled on the back of a shipping invoice: the continents drawn from memory, every bay approximate, Africa leaning east like a man who had missed his train. She had promised to make it right before the wedding.

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She worked through the afternoon. The Americas took the longest, because Tom had drawn the Gulf of Mexico as a sort of puddle, and she could not bring herself to leave a puddle in the middle of anything she had ever been asked to keep. Europe she did in one stroke of the nib, the way her father had taught her to draw a hand, without lifting. Australia came easily. Asia she left until last, because it was always the largest and the most argued over, and because she kept thinking of the phone call.

When the ink was dry she sent him a photograph of the finished page, and then, because it felt foolish not to, a second one of the outline on her own ribs, traced there the night before in biro so she could see the shape of the world from the side. Tom wrote back within a minute. Is that where you keep it now, he asked. She told him yes. It was the only map she trusted to stay put.