A world map tattooed across a person's upper back, with black outlines and coloured fills on some countries.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map tattoo across the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large world map covers the upper back, showing North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Black outlines mark the continents and country borders, with a few countries and regions filled in green, purple, brown and teal. The map is shown from behind, filling most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Back World map Continent Map 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

Hush now, and mind the fire, because this is a long one and the snow has shut the road behind us, so none of you are going anywhere before morning. Years ago in Bristol there was a map house on Corn Street, and in its back room sat a colourist called Agnes Quill, who had hands like wet bread and eyes that could split a hair. Pell, the engraver, inked every border so fine you needed a glass to see it, and then he went home and left Agnes to fill the lands with her washes. Green for the new country across the water, purple for the southern cape, a brown so warm it looked like toast for the mountains. She had one rule that nobody believed until they saw it. She would only colour a place she had received a letter about.

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So the sailors wrote to her. A bosun sent a page torn from a logbook with the coast of Zanzibar drawn in tar. A widow in Valparaiso sent a recipe for bread and, folded inside it, the name of the village where her husband was buried, and Agnes painted that small corner teal and said nothing about it for a month. The letters came in sacks and the sheets grew fat with colour, and the house made a fortune selling them to schoolrooms. Then a lord in London wrote to say the whole empire must be one shade, to look tidy on his dining room wall, and he sent a boy with a fat purse to fetch the finished sheets.

Agnes gave the boy the sheets, every one of them, and kept the lands she had no letters for bare as they came off the press. The lord hung his map and grew puzzled by the pale patches, and his guests grew puzzled too, and the story reached Bristol and stayed there. Look at the pale places on that wall above you, if the lamp reaches. They are the ones nobody asked her to colour, and I have always thought they are the most honest part of any map.