Black and grey world map tattoo filled with ornate dotwork patterns across the upper back of a person with hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person seen from behind, with hair tied up, against a dark background. A large world map covers the upper back and shoulders, with the continents filled in with intricate mandala-like ornamentation. The work is rendered in black ink and grey tones, using dense dots and solid black areas.

Blackwork Dotwork Back World map Continent Mandala Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Tomas, the snow shut the pass on Tuesday, so I have had three days by the stove with nothing to do but finish the plate. You will laugh. I have put your mother's lace on Africa again, the wheel-and-thread pattern she stitched into the altar cloths, because the coast there wanted something to hold it together and a plain line kept sliding off the paper.

Keep reading

The carrier who brought the last ink said the Americas looked like a pair of mittens somebody had dropped in the road. I told him they were gloves for a larger hand. He did not understand, and I did not explain that every continent I have engraved has come out wearing someone's grandmother's pattern, because that is the only way I know to make a thing feel lived in rather than measured.

This morning the sky cleared over the Simplon road and I watched a line of mule trains crawling toward the summit, small as beads on a string. Nobody below the pass will ever know which of them carried the salt and which the wool. I wrote their names on the back of the copper in pencil anyway, where the ink cannot reach.

Come home by the spring thaw. The plate is nearly done and I have left Australia bare, so you can fill it in however you like.