Black and grey dotwork world map tattoo filled with mandala and paisley ornament, sitting on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map tattoo filled with mandala patterns

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A world map is tattooed along the side of the ribs, with the continents of the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia shown in outline. Each landmass is filled with stippled dotwork and ornamental mandala and paisley motifs, with a large mandala medallion over Asia. The ink is black and grey, and the design spans most of the visible torso with the black top framing the upper edge.

Dotwork Ribs World map Continent Mandala Paisley Ornament Globe

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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

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only just gone off. You want to hear about Mrs Adeyemi's map? Fourteenth floor of Haldane House, lift broken as usual, and on her living room wall she has the whole world. Bought it off a market stall in Peckham for two pounds, the paper gone the colour of weak tea at the corners. When I first saw it, the countries were just empty outlines, like biscuits nobody had iced.

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Then one winter, when the heating packed in and she was stuck indoors with her pens, she started filling them in. Africa got the paisley from her aunt's wedding shawl, all those teardrops curling into each other. South America got little stippled dots, thousands of them, done with a compass point she swore was her late husband's. Asia she gave a great round mandala, sixteen petals, copied from a tiled wall in a mosque her mother used to pass on the bus. Her grandson called it vandalism. She told him the sea could stay white. The sea was where everybody got lost anyway.

The council man came round in February about the damp. He stood in front of the wall with his clipboard for a good five minutes, not writing a thing. Turned out his mother was born somewhere in that big round flower over India, and he'd never once seen her country drawn with anything but straight lines.

When he'd gone she stood on a chair with her finger on the edge of the Americas, following the outline like a road she meant to drive. Then she said, to nobody, that the edges were always the easy part. Next winter, she told me, she'd start on the sea.