Four stacked photographs of a world map tattoo across a man's upper back, moving from black outline to a partly coloured map with countries filled in.

World map tattoo across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The image is a four-panel sequence showing a large world map tattooed across a person's upper back, with the head and face cropped out of frame. The first panels show black outlines of continents and national borders, and the lower panels show progressively more countries filled with green, orange, purple, blue and other colours. The map spans from the shoulder blades to the lower back, with the outline work appearing clean and the colour fills sitting within the borders.

Back World map Continent Border Outline Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harriet had been told the colours were a matter of arithmetic. Green for the countries that had sent letters, orange for the ones that had sent photographs, and purple for the places nobody in Lowestoft could pronounce. She sat at the kitchen table with the old school atlas open beside her and a jar of rinsed brushes going cloudy, and she did not look up when her brother came in from the rain.

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"You'll have it finished by Christmas," Dennis said, dripping onto the lino.

"It's not a race." She dabbed a fleck of ochre into the outline of Mongolia and watched it spread to the border, neat as a pressed leaf. Forty years of postcards had taught her where the lines ran. Their father had taught her to keep the colour inside them.

Dennis pulled out a chair and sat on it the wrong way round. "Mum always said you'd colour the whole world in and then have nothing left to look at."

She laughed, which surprised them both. The lamp hummed. Outside, a gull worked at the bins with the patience of a clerk. She reached the southern islands last, the ones they had argued over all week, and gave them the palest blue in the tin. Then she capped the ink and told him what she had been putting off: she was leaving one small country bare, a clean space the size of a thumbprint, for whatever letter came next.