Black and grey fine line tattoo of a map outline with a small heart inside, on the shoulder of a person whose head is bowed, in sepia tone.

Map outline tattoo on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A sepia photograph taken from behind shows a person with their head bowed and one hand resting on their shoulder. On the upper arm sits a thin single-line tattoo of two connected map-like outlines, with a small heart marked inside the lower shape. The soft, dark background and warm monochrome tone focus attention on the skin and the delicate linework.

Fine line Shoulder Map Outline Heart

Find an artist for this

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

You inherit the royal survey the winter the two halves of Caddern stop speaking to each other. The northern lobe keeps its ink in brass pots and its roads in good repair; the southern lobe keeps its goats, its salt and its grudges. Between them runs a neck of marsh no wider than a rowing boat is long, and the old maps call it the Wrist, because that is where the kingdom bends when someone wants it pulled apart.

Keep reading

The Queen's order is simple: draw the coast as it is, not as the lords wish it were. So you walk it with a measuring chain and a sack of pins. At low tide you measure the causeway twice, and at the inn in Sallow Cross an old ferryman tells you the marsh was dry land once, and that a girl walked across it every market morning with eggs for her husband's people on the far side. Nobody thought to ask her which side she belonged to. You write that in the margin of your field book, then cross it out, then write it again in smaller letters.

When the survey is finished, the Queen's clerk wants the Wrist inked as a border, one hard black line through the middle. You refuse, and your pen hangs over the vellum for an hour while the candle gutters. Instead you trace both lobes in a single unbroken stroke, the way a child draws around a hand, and where the marsh should be you press your thumb into the wet ink and leave a small smudge shaped like a heart, low in the south.

The clerk calls it a blot and wants it scraped. You tell him it is the only honest mark on the sheet: the place where the two halves still touch. Forty years later the map hangs in the archive at Caddern, the smudge faded to the colour of weak tea, and no surveyor has ever dared to redraw the line.