Black and grey fine line tattoo of a fantasy map with labels including the Shire, Hobbiton and Bree, placed across a person's upper back.

Middle-earth map tattoo on a upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A hand-drawn map of a fictional land sits across the upper back, with the labels 'the Shire', 'Hobbiton', 'Bree' and 'Blue Mountains' written in lettering. The map uses thin dotted routes, a winding river, and small hatched and solid shapes for hills, mountains and trees. The piece is entirely black ink in greys and black with no colour, and the design is spread across the skin with open space around it.

Fine line Back Map Mountain Tree River Road Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bypass had to be inked by Friday, so Doreen Askew sat under the lamp at the county surveyor's office and drew the road she was paid to draw, then a second road beside it that nobody had asked for. She used a fine technical pen and handled it as carefully as a needle, dotting a route from a grey hill with a single pine on its shoulder, down past a ford, to a village she spelled Bree because the name had come to her that way.

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Her supervisor, Mr Harlow, leaned over the board and tapped the paper. 'Nobody's paying for a footpath to a place that isn't on the Ordnance Survey,' he said. 'Make it a dotted line, then, Doreen. Dotted lines are cheap.' She did not argue. She drew small hatching for the hills and a row of solid trees along the river, which she had named the Brandy without telling anyone, and in the corner she lettered the mountains in capitals like a shopfront sign: Blue Mountains, though the paper showed them grey.

Her nephew Colin came round on Sundays and always wanted to see the drawings. He traced the dotted road with a bitten fingernail and asked where it went. 'Somewhere you'd have to walk,' she said, which was true enough. He asked whether there was a pub. She told him there was an inn at the crossroads with a fire that never went out and a landlord who remembered every guest's boots.

The bypass was approved in the spring and built by August. The working copy with the dotted road went into a grey cabinet and was never filed. Years later a lorry driver stopped Colin outside a petrol station, lost and cross, asking for the turning to a place with a hill and a pine. Colin, who had kept a folded copy in his wallet, opened it on the bonnet and ran his finger along the dots until the driver nodded and pulled away the way he was told.