Close-up of a small fine line tattoo of a world map outline on the inner wrist, with a hand raised in front of a printed map.

Fine line world map on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline tattoo of the continents sits on the inner wrist, showing North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia in thin, even linework. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the image is in natural colour against a multicoloured paper world map behind the hand. The tattoo is placed at the centre of the frame, with the raised hand and arm filling most of the composition.

Fine line Forearm World map Continent Map Outline Wrist

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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

The last thing Harold Penrose did before the carrier's cart came for him was ask Miss Wyatt for a pen. She had a blue one from the inkwell box, and she held his wrist flat on the schoolroom desk while he drew the world onto it, slowly, the way the big map on the wall had taught him. He drew America first, because it was the furthest, and he wanted to be sure he could find his way back.

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Forty years on he came back to the school hall for the reunion and rolled back his cuff, and the villagers saw the lines still there, thin and grey as a fishing net. Old Ruth Calloway said the map had shrunk on him. Harold said that was only because he had walked the coastlines so often that the edges had worn smooth. Nobody believed him. Everybody wanted to see where Norway ended.

Then the children of the families who had stayed began to ask him where the places were. He pointed with one finger and told them about the ports he had seen, the heat over the Gulf of Mexico, the ice off the top of Greenland that he had watched through a porthole for three days. Each time he named a country he touched the place on his skin, and each time someone in the hall found they knew the name too.

Harold died the winter after. The village says Miss Wyatt's blue ink never faded from the schoolhouse wall, and that every spring the children copy their own wrists onto paper with a biro and check that the coasts are where they left them. The lines always meet across the Atlantic, so that nobody needs to cross it to get home.