From a Biker web site, a tattoo of a man’s back, a map of an island. That’s all I know.
http://www.bikerlife.com/images/tat019.jpg
My question: what is it a map of? A real place? Mythical island?
Just a WAG, but it looks a little like part of Scotland…
My WAG is that it’s a fictitious map. The script above the island appears to read “Ocean of <something>”, but I don’t know of any place with that name on this planet.
Looks like Isle Royale to me, if you take the colored-in part as water and the white part as land…
I’m pretty sure the middle part says L-something Lake.
At present, I vote fictitious. I think the colored in part is supposed to be land. I agree that it appears to say Lxxxxx Lake and, to the north, Ocean of Dragons(?). The clear “Lake” made me think of English speaking countries, so I flipped through my Atlas. Well, that made it easy enough to check out all countries, and I just didn’t find it.
You know, it looks an awful lot like medieval maps that I have seen.
Perhaps the coat of arms displayed next to it has something to do with it. There’s another picture of the guy which shows that more fully:
http://www.bikerlife.com/images/tat020.jpg
If the arms are related, that suggests fictional or European / Colonial. If not fictional, it could be a historic region which no longer has those boundaries, like some kingdom which is now part of a larger country. Nothing indicates scale, and it could be a very small area.
I agree that it appears to be fictional, but I cannot find it in J. B. Post’s An Atlas of Fantasy. (It is not Scotland or Ireland: the glaciers left those lands with a distinct Southwest/Northeast character along the ridges and valleys with their lochs, while the tatoo’s mountains and islands tend to run 90° away from that orientation.
The myffic continent of Atlantis is often depicted as a hollow circle, with an inner lagoon connected to the surrounding ocean via narrow straits - sort of a crushed “U” (couldn’t find any maps - Tom, check the beginning of Post’s book). The tattoo could be an imaginative variation.
If it is from a fantasy book, it must be one hell of a book to make someone permentantly etch a map on their back.
It shares similarities to the maps of Pern I’ve seen, but not it’s not identical.
Note the image of a Nessie-like creature in the central body of water…
Doesn’t say “Loch Ness”, though, but “Lake L____” as others have noted.
It strongly resembles several areas of the Canadian Arctic, both small and large… in fact, it works well as a fractal of a couple areas.