Black line-work street map tattoo on the inner forearm with one small red block marking a single location.

City street map tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a street grid, with thin uneven lines forming blocks and a few curved roads along the bottom edge. One small square near the centre is filled with red, and the rest is black line work. The map sits on the forearm, photographed straight on against a dark wooden background.

Fine line Forearm Map City Grid Road

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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

Tomas, the council have finally finished digging up Calder Street, so I've had to draw you the new route, because the old one will only take you into a hole. Don't laugh. I know you think I can't read a plan of anything since they stopped printing the bus times on the back of the paper. But I walked these pavements for forty years and my legs still remember where the kerbs dip.

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I started at the top with the railway bridge, the one with the wall that smelled of wet pennies, and worked my way down. The lines are wobbly because I drew them at the kitchen table with your father's old pencil, the one he sharpened with a blade until there was barely an inch of it left. Where I got a street wrong I left it wrong. The curve along the bottom is the canal road, bending like a dropped scarf, and I gave it an extra loop because the lock keeper always said it was longer than it looked.

The red square is Mrs Okafor's bakery on the corner of Ferris Row, where you spent your dinner money on bread that was never quite fresh enough to sell but always warm enough to be worth it. It's shuttered now. I coloured it in so you'd know which door to knock on if you ever come back and find the street looking nothing like the one you left. I'll be the one behind it, with the kettle on, not moving an inch.