Pencil sketch design of a map of Canada with a dotted grid, a compass rose, a maple leaf and dripping outline, over dashed geometric guide lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Canada map with compass rose and maple leaf sketch

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing an outline of Canada filled with a grid of dots and circles. A compass rose sits to the right, with a small maple leaf near the lower edge, and the outline has drips running from it. Dashed construction lines, small circles and triangles surround the motif in black and grey linework and light shading.

Geometric Dotwork Map Compass rose Maple leaf Dot Circle Triangle Drip Dashed line

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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

Pell wanted the sheet clean by Friday, and I had spent Wednesday night ruling the dashed meridians under the lamp in the Department's back room, the bottle of Indian ink wedged between my knees so it wouldn't tip. Every town on the survey got a dot. Every lake got a ring of pencilled circles, some so faint they only showed when the light came low across the paper. The compass rose was Pell's idea, its eight points sharpened with a rule until they could have cut bread. He insisted north run true to the top margin, and I let him have it.

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The leaf was mine. I drew it in the bottom corner where the Atlantic should have been, small enough to pass for a printer's mark, and I hoped he wouldn't look. On Thursday he did. He found the ink too, the bottle having finally gone over along the Labrador coast, and the spill ran down the edge of the country in long grey beads, the way meltwater runs off the eaves before it freezes. Pell said it looked like a wound. I said the rivers did that every spring, and that someone ought to say so on paper.

He took it to the Surveyor General that afternoon with the drips still wet. Nobody sent it back. Years later my sister wrote to say a copy hung in a schoolroom in Saskatoon, and that the children there traced the dashed lines with their fingers and asked why the leaf was hiding in the corner. The teacher told them it was a mistake, she said, and nobody had ever thought to correct it.