Large world map tattoo on the side of a torso, shown as aged parchment with scorched ochre edges, dark outlined continents and pale country borders.

World map tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large world map is tattooed along the side of the torso, with continents outlined in dark line and filled with pale, unshaded skin tones. The sea areas and the burnt, torn edges of the parchment are shaded in ochre, brown and dark green to give an aged, singed effect. The design runs vertically down the ribs and fills most of the frame.

Ribs World map Map Continent Ocean

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

The rain came sideways off the river at half past seven, and I had the atlas under the tarpaulin before the bric-a-brac man next door had finished swearing at his awning. The sheet I kept back for wet days was the one nobody wanted: a world map on thick laid paper, its edges burnt into lace, the sea gone the colour of weak tea. A house clearance in Carlisle had yielded it from a fire, and I'd paid a fiver, told that the continents were still legible, which was true if you squinted and didn't mind that half the borders had been drawn in ink that had since run.

Keep reading

I spent my first winter on the stall tracing those borders with a finger. Some lines I knew: the long bend of a coast, a river running north like a crack in a teacup. Others belonged to countries that no longer existed, their capitals marked in red, the red gone to rust where the scorch had reached it. A woman in a green coat stopped one Thursday and asked whether the place in the middle of the sheet still appeared on any map. I said I didn't think so. She bought a tin of pear drops instead and kept looking back at the sheet the whole way down the aisle.

That was the trouble with the burnt margins. They made you want to go further in, past the ochre and the dark green smoke, to the pale unshaded land where nothing had yet been decided. I stopped selling it for a while. Then in March a boy of about nine came by with his father, pointed at the scorched edge and asked what lay beyond it. His father laughed. I didn't. I said I'd never checked, and that it was probably sea.

When the rain eased I rolled the map back into its tube. The corners were still damp, and the smell of smoke had come up through the paper. I put it on the top shelf, where the light from the street couldn't reach, and left it there to dry out on its own.