Everyone the world over agrees: a tattoo should symbolise something meaningful, all the better if it tells a story. No one wants to hear that the beautiful design running down someone’s sleeve is nothing more than a fashion statement.

What once started out as a mark of tribal unity, to then transform into the signature of the outsider, tattoos are today very much part of pop culture, with over one in five British adults now inked in some form of body art.

Has its mass popularity led to tattoos losing their power to make a statement? On the contrary, suggests Momondo, the travel company the viral campaign The DNA Journey, the first in a series of powerful campaigns that connect people from all over the world in unexpected ways.  

For their latest venture, titled The World Piece, Momondo brings together 61 people from all over the world, to literally draw a line between them in order to create one ever-flowing pattern that links them as one canvas.

Standing in a circle, proudly displaying the intertwined inkwork running across their backs, we see one women admit there was a time she’d have loathed to even look at some of those she stands in the the circle with, let alone stand there undressed and sharing the same ink with them. The ex-soldier traumatised by the brutalities of his past. The mother fearful of the obstacles her daughter might face for having a different shade of skin colour to her.

The British grandmother who says, “there’s so much that’s pulling us apart at the moment, and we need to reverse that trend. It’s so easy to destroy, and so difficult to build up.”

This particular point about division is what lies at the heart of Momondo’s new global initiative, on the back of the findings in its global study “The Value of Traveling 2019: Opening our World”. People all over the world are growing more intolerant, with 49% holding the opinion that people are less accepting of other cultures than they were five years ago.

How to close that divide? Travel, of course, with the old adage about how it broadens the mind as relevant now as it ever was.  

And what better way to illustrate this than by creating a visual, living manifestation of human connection? Per Christiansen, VP, Marketing EMEA at Momondo explains the reason why these 61 individuals from all over the world lined up next to one another: “to show that despite our differences, we are united in our humanity.”

These powerful stories, translated into unique segments by the globally renowned tattoo artist Mo Ganji on each back to form the complete story when all participants come together as one, does exactly what a tattoo was originally meant to do. Show that you belong to something much bigger.

Although you just have to love the guy who simply says, “I’m here for the love. There’s not enough of it.”

To discover more about The World Piece visit momondo.com/theworldpiece