Fine line black tattoo of the outline of Great Britain and Ireland on an ankle, with a black taxi on a city street behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Map of the UK outline on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of the outline of Great Britain and Ireland sits on the side of a person's ankle, above a black trainer. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is a dark brown-black. The photograph is taken from street level, with a pavement in the foreground and a black London taxi and pedestrians blurred in the background.

Fine line Ankle Map Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the A-road at half three, so by six there were only four of us left in the bar of the Hare and Fiddle, and the stranger had been trying to draw Britain on a beer mat for the best part of an hour. He kept putting Ireland too far west. Mrs Abney from the post office leaned over to correct him twice, and twice he rubbed the line out with his thumb until the card went soft and grey.

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Where'd you learn it, then? I asked, mostly to stop him wrecking another mat. He said his father had drawn the same outline on the back of every envelope in the house, from memory, because the atlas had gone missing on a train in 1979 and never been replaced. The father had never been further than Holyhead. The son had made it to London and back and still couldn't get the bottom of Cornwall to sit right.

The pipes knocked, the lamps dipped, and for a minute we all listened to the wind work at the shutters. When the power came back he had stopped drawing. He was looking at the chalkboard by the fire, the faded school map I'd bought from a jumble sale in Keld, with its pencil ticks marking every place somebody had ever come back from.

I took the beer mat from him, smoothed it flat on the bar, and traced the coast with my finger, leaving a thumbprint on Wales. Then I said, Ireland goes there, and he laughed for the first time all night. In the morning the road was open and he was gone, but the mat was folded in his coat pocket, and when I picked up the pen again Ireland sat exactly where it belonged.