Close-up of a grey shaded world map tattoo on the upper arm, with the Americas on the left and Europe and Africa on the right.

World map tattoo on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a world map with North and South America on the left and Europe and Africa on the right, with a shaded band of ocean below. The continents use fine outlines and soft grey shading, with darker tones on the land and lighter fading at the edges. The image is a close, softly focused shot of the arm, with long hair on the left and a blurred background.

Upper arm World map Map Continent Africa Ocean

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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 atlas was already falling apart when Tomas left it on the landing, its spine held together with fishing line and a strip of my mother's oilcloth. Nobody had opened it since the winter the relief boat stopped coming. I took it up the tower anyway, because the lamp needed cleaning and I had decided to stop pretending I did not want to see the whole world from the top of the lens room.

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Every night I lit the lamp at dusk and watched the beam swing across the grey water toward the place where the Atlantic seemed to run out of ideas. Tomas had drawn his own map in the back of the atlas, in pencil, going round the edges: the Cape, the Rio Plate, the long coast of Ireland he swore was drawn wrong. He had never been further than Stornoway. He said the sea was a blank he meant to fill in later, once he had the nerve to cross it.

The first ship that passed after the storm was a container vessel, low and rust-streaked, and its crew raised a hand at the light the way people wave at a dog they do not own. I waved back. Then I went down and took a pencil to the band of water beneath the continents, shading it soft the way Tomas always did, darker near the rocks and paler where the sea opened out.

In the morning the oilcloth had stuck to the page where Europe met Africa. I peeled it back carefully. Tomas's ink had bled into the paper like a bruise, and I thought that is what a map is for, to show you where someone has been and where they meant to go next. I closed the atlas and left it open on the sill, facing the sea.