Black line drawing of a world map built from triangular geometric facets on plain white paper, resembling a tattoo design sketch.

Geometric world map line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows the outlines of the continents and several islands, rendered as a network of straight black lines that form triangles and irregular polygons. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, so each landmass reads as a set of flat geometric panels. The design sits centred on a plain white background with no colour apart from the black ink.

Geometric World map Continent Island Triangle Polygon Line drawing

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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

Sit nearer, the fire's gone to ash and I'll not shout. You want to know why Mother Ansel drew the world in sticks and corners? Her hand shook after the fever, and a shaking hand cannot make a curve. So she laid the coastlines down with a straight edge and a ruling pen, and every bay became a point, every headland a fan of little triangles.

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The harbour men laughed at her. A chart is for finding your way, they said, and no sailor steers by angles. But she set her ink to the cliffs at Scarrow and the shoals off Hedd, and when the fishing fleet came home in the blow they found the old rocks exactly where her lines said they lay, which was more than the curved charts had ever done. She kept the big lands tight and stitched them together with thin lines the fog could not blur.

The last thing she drew was the little isle of Tern, no bigger than a thumbnail on the page. My brother Oswin had rowed out to it for gulls' eggs the spring before the storm. She gave it three lines and one shard of a triangle, and pinned the sheet above the door where the wind could find it. Her ink had run thin all winter, so the line came out fine as a hair.

Some nights I think that shard is the only honest part of the whole world. Everything else is joined up, neat and certain, but Tern is just a point you have to squint at to believe in. Pass me that cup. The tide's turned, and Oswin's boat is still out there somewhere, drawn small.