Fine line black outline tattoo of the map of Australia on the side of an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Australia map outline on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of the Australian continent, including Tasmania as a small separate shape, is tattooed on the side of a foot near the ankle. The black linework is thin and slightly uneven, with no shading or fill inside the outline. The skin is pale and lit softly against a dark background, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Fine line Ankle Map Outline Continent

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the stool, it has one leg shorter than the story. Ada Crane was twelve when the clerk at the surveyor's office gave her the job of copying the south coast from a fair chart onto a brass plate, and she took the pen the way my father held a fish, firmly and without much hope of it staying put. The clerk said a line must never be lifted. One unbroken stroke, he said, or the sea will think you've left a gap for it to come through.

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So she went all the way round the continent without lifting, past the gulf where the cliffs fold like a badly written letter, along the thin dry top where the rivers forget their own names, down the long eastern shoulder and into the bay where ships used to anchor for fresh water. Her wrist ached. The lamp guttered. At the very end, where the coast turns back on itself, her hand gave a small shiver, and a drop of ink fell off the nib and sat on the paper by itself, round and separate, as if it had decided to be an island of its own.

The clerk was furious until he held the plate up to the window. Then he laughed and said the drop was the island in the south and it must stay exactly where it fell. They sent the plate out on the next packet, and for years captains steered by it with their hats off, and nobody thought to ask why a girl who could draw a whole country in one go had let a single drop escape.

Ada always said it was no accident. A line that ends in a drop has finished its journey, she said, and that is a better thing than a line that simply stops. That's the tale. The ale is on the bar, so pay the lad, he's been waiting since the first sentence.