Fine line gold world map outline tattoo on a woman's upper back, with a partly visible gold script on her left shoulder.

Gold world map outline on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with dark hair, wearing a white vest top, is seen from behind. A thin gold outline of the world map sits on her upper back, with the continents drawn as simple unshaded lines. A partly cropped gold script design is visible on her left shoulder, and the warm, blurred background keeps the focus on the back.

Fine line Back Shoulder World map Continent Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hallam had the press warm by ten o'clock, which was the only hour the foil took properly. Gerda's ledger lay open on the bench beside the proofs, and the last order was for the Ashworth Line, six hundred sheets of the world in gold leaf, for a shipping office that wanted the sea to look expensive. Nobody in the works had ever asked why the continents were drawn as bare lines with no hatching.

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Outside on Lower Ardent Street the rain had stopped and the gutters ran under the sodium lamps. Hallam pulled the first sheet, lifted it on the blade and watched the foil settle. Each outline was a single pass of the stylus, copied from a survey she had inherited from her uncle, who had drawn it at a desk in Hull and never once left the Humber. She could trace his coastlines in her sleep. She had, twice.

At half past two she reached the southern tip of South America and found the old survey had a mistake, a little bay the width of a fingernail that had been silted up for decades. She could have corrected it. Instead she left the bay open on the proof, a small curve of nothing, and pulled the remaining sheets with it still there.

When the consignment went out on Friday, the clerk at the shipping office sent back a note asking whether the printer had meant to show a harbour. Hallam wrote back that the sea was always moving, and that anyone who wanted the exact coast could walk down to the water and check it for themselves.