Man's Tattoo Tracks World Travels

Traveler gets inked each time he visits a country.

ByABC News
February 17, 2014, 11:15 AM
Bill Passman's tattoo is seen after filling in some of the countries he has visited.
Bill Passman's tattoo is seen after filling in some of the countries he has visited.
Caters News Agency

Feb. 17, 2014— -- While most travelers use photography and souvenirs to remember the places they've been, one man has taken a much more permanent approach to recording his trips.

For the last four years, Bill Passman, a former lawyer in Louisiana, has been tracing his steps in foreign countries via a large world map tattoo on his back.

Passman, 59, wrote on his blog that he was inspired to begin the evolving ink project while sitting in a bar in Utila, Honduras, where he met a woman who was marking her travels via red dots on a similar outline of a world map tattoo.

But the retiree takes his body art in a much more vibrant direction, coloring in each country with a different hue once he has visited. The map currently has 60 different nations filled in, including from his most recent post documenting Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Finland and Russia.

ABC News' attempts to reach Passman for comment were not immediately responded to, likely because he is on the road somewhere.

"I got the tattoo as a way to show my passion for travel," he wrote on the blog.