Black and grey shaded tattoo of the world map with continents blended softly across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map tattoo on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a world map with the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia shown as dark, shaded landmasses. The continents use soft grey wash shading with darker edges and fine highlights, giving a slightly faded, painterly effect. It spans the side of the torso, with the design running from the upper left across the ribs to the lower right.

Ribs World map Continent Map Globe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp came through the outside wall of flat 14C in the winter of the big floods, and by March it had crept across the living room in a shape nobody could name. Mrs Adeyemi called it a map. Her grandson called it a ghost. I called it my problem, because I was the one with the sponge, the bucket of mould-block and the tin of pale grey emulsion, and she was paying me in ginger biscuits and opinions.

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Working round it for three weeks, I started to see countries. The long, ragged curl of South America sat beside the window where the sill had rotted. Africa was a dark bruise above the radiator. Asia spread across the whole far wall like tea across a tablecloth, its edges going soft where the paint had lifted. I kept meaning to cover it. Instead I traced it with a pencil from her kitchen drawer, one coast at a time, while she told me about cousins in Lagos and cousins in Leeds, and which of them owed her money.

On my last afternoon she asked me to leave the wall alone. I told her the damp would only come back through the new paint. "Let it come back," she said. She pointed at a small smudge south of the bruise, an island the water had almost forgotten. "Sola drew that for me the year we moved in, on the back of a gas bill. He got the proportions wrong, the silly man. Australia was too big. I never let him fix it."

I packed my brushes and left the wall as it was. Walking down fourteen flights of stairs, I thought about the far side of the world, somewhere past the water, where someone was probably standing under a damp patch of their own, deciding whether to paint it over. The lift still wasn't working, so I took the stairs slowly and let the light from the landing windows fall on my hands like a map I hadn't finished reading.