Fine line tattoo of multicoloured angular lines resembling a transit map, shown on the top of a foot.

Multicoloured transit map lines on a foot

Fine line · Other · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a foot with a tattoo of thin, multicoloured lines that run in angular, stepped paths and loosely resemble a transit map. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, in orange, blue, green, pink, purple and red. The design sits across the top of the foot near the ankle, with the toes and a patterned rug visible in the frame.

Fine line Geometric Other Line Foot

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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

They gave me the job in 1971 because I was the last draughtsman in the building who could rule a straight line without a set square. The Corporation had decided the old network map on the platform wall looked like a bowl of dropped spaghetti, and a man from the head office wanted it to look like something you could trust. My instructions were three pages long. Every line had to run at forty-five degrees or ninety. Every bend had to be a clean step. Nothing curved, because a curve suggested the city had been built by accident.

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I worked at a sloped table under a lamp that hummed, with a tin of coloured inks that dried faster than I could mix them. Orange for the northern loop, blue for the long run out to the reservoirs, green for the line that served the dockyards, pink and purple for the two I was told to keep apart even where they touched. The river was the hardest. It wandered across the city like a drunk man going home, and the instructions said it had to become a single firm stroke. I drew it the way a stair is drawn, all steps and no slope, and the Thames of Carrick Street vanished into a grid of right angles.

The map went up in the spring. I stood on the platform with a cup of tea and watched people read it. A woman with a pram traced the orange line with one finger and nodded as if it had told her something true. Nobody asked where the sea had gone, or why the docks now sat in the middle of nowhere.

Before the printers came I went back to the table with a fine nib and put one small jog into the pink line, where the old tram sheds had stood. It was a single step, no more. Nobody would ever notice it. I have ridden that line a hundred times since and still look for it, the one place where the map admits it was drawn by a person.