Fine line tattoo of coloured transit map style routes in red, pink, orange, blue and green across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured transit map lines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a network of thin, straight lines with angled and stepped bends, resembling a transit map. The lines are in red, pink, orange, blue and green, with a small circular station marking near the centre. The forearm fills most of the frame against a dark background, with a small outlined tattoo visible at the right edge.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Line Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Hollis Road signal box ever asked what the red line was for. Maureen had drawn the whole network on the back of a spare timetable in 1968, in biro, then gone over it with the felt tips her nephew left behind, so the orange ran where the District should have run and the green swooped into the yard where no train had ever stopped. By the time the box closed, the map had gone yellow above the kettle and nobody could say which line was ours.

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The lad came in the week before the closure, asking for a station that did not exist. He had a rucksack and a folded letter with a postcode pencilled in the margin. I told him to sit by the stove while I found the right pencil. He traced the blue line with one finger, stopped at the small circle near the middle, and said that was where his gran had worked. "Everyone's gran worked somewhere," I said, which was unkind, and he laughed anyway.

That evening I took the map down and unrolled it on the desk. In the bottom corner, in Maureen's careful capitals, was a note I had never bothered to read: STEP DOWN HERE IF YOU'VE LOST YOUR WAY. The stepped bends, I saw then, were not mistakes. Each one was where a line bent to clear the old tunnels, so a train could still get through when the straight route had caved in.

I posted the map to the address on his letter, with the circle ringed twice in green. Two days later a reply came, written on the back of a bus ticket. It said only: It's still there. Platform four. Tell her I found the step.