Dark linework tattoo on upper back and shoulder

In Estrel the chart-makers were a guild of women who cut their maps into copper with needles finer than a hair. Their best engraver was called Ilse Marrow, and her work was the kind that made sailors weep. Every reef came drawn with a single dark thread, and every fern of weed curled up the margins as if it had grown there overnight. The king paid her in salt and silver, and she spent the silver on ink made from burnt oak and sea-gall, the blackest black in the realm, because she said a line that could not be seen by lamplight was no line at all.

Then came the storm of the year the river froze. The tide climbed over the harbour wall, took the chart-house with it, copper plates and all, and when the water went back out the plates were gone. Ilse walked the shore for nine days. On the tenth morning she found one plate lying face up in the shingle, the fern lines still bright, and beside it a trail of the same dark thread running down into the surf, stitching itself across the waves in a pattern no needle had ever cut.

They say she waded out after it. They say the threads are still there if you stand on the grey rock at dusk and let your eyes go soft. Sailors call it the Hollow Stitch and steer wide of it. I think it is the only honest map ever made, because it shows you exactly where the sea has been and never once pretends to know where it is going.