Colour tattoo of a vintage-style map of the Great Lakes with a compass rose, across a person's upper back, with their head cropped out of frame.

Great Lakes map and compass across a back

Back · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo of a map of the Great Lakes covers most of the upper back, with lakes shaded in blue and land in warm orange and brown. A compass rose sits above the map, and French and English place names are lettered in a serif font. The photograph is taken from behind, with the head cropped out and a mobile phone visible in one hand.

Back Map Compass Compass rose Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The map had hung above the ticket window at Sudbury Junction since before my father took the job, and nobody had ever agreed on how to spell anything on it. Lac Supérieur wore its accent in French ink while the English clerks had written Superior in pencil beside it, and one winter a man from Toronto tried to scrub Pays des Renards off with a wet cloth. Only the compass stayed put, its brass face glinting over the water like a watchful sun.

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Madame Vautrin came in every second Tuesday with a pocket atlas and a list of places she swore were still on her grandfather's maps. She wanted a ticket to Lansing, and then she wanted one to a place called Pays des Mascoutens, which no timetable had printed since 1890. I told her the railway had folded the old names into the new ones. She said maps don't fold, people do.

I sold her the ticket anyway. On her last Tuesday she left a folded sheet under the brass grille: a copy of the map with every lake traced in soft pencil, and a line running from the compass rose down to the small dot marked Lansing. Beneath it, in a shaky hand, she had written: point the needle where you are going, and it will tell you where you were.

That night I took the map down and turned it over. The back was blank except for one pencilled arrow, and the arrow, I realised, pointed straight at the platform clock where I had stood every evening for twenty years. I hung the map back up, and for the first time the compass seemed to be pointing at me.