Close photograph of a fine line black outline tattoo of a globe with continents, on the inner forearm of a person lying on white bedding.

Outline globe on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small circle with outlined continents and coastlines sits on the inner forearm, drawn in thin black linework with no shading. The arm rests across white bedding and a pale pillow, with a blue denim fabric in the lower right of the frame. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame, so the design is clear and easy to read.

Fine line Forearm Globe Continent Map Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Chancellor wants the whole world on a disc no wider than a coin, and he wants it finished before the Thursday court. You are the only mapmaker left in the workshop with a steady enough hand for coastlines, so you sit at the north window with a pen whose nib has gone soft from cleaning, and you begin with the sea, because the sea is the part nobody checks.

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Outlines only, he has said. Ink is dear, and a kingdom that shades its mountains has time to waste. So you draw the rim of Hallet Bay, the thin hook of the Sorrow Isles, the long shrug of the western continent where the guild keeps its drowned archive. You leave the middle blank. Nobody in Verrenmoor has crossed the second river in living memory, and you have decided that a line need only be honest where it touches water.

On Thursday the Chancellor holds the disc up to the lamp and frowns at the empty interior. Then his daughter, who has never once been allowed past the palace gate, takes it from him and runs one finger around the coast of the far continent. Does it have a shore too, she asks, on the other side? You tell her it does, and that it is the same shore, only turned round, and that all the lines meet somewhere if you are patient enough to follow them.

That night you go back to the workshop alone and close the gap you left on the last stroke, so the continents have no beginning and no end, just one unbroken rim. The disc goes into the plaster of the council wall, where nobody will see it except the next mapmaker who needs a wall to hang a thing on. You keep the pen. It still runs true along a curve, and you find you can no longer draw a straight line.