Fine line black outline of a world map tattooed on the inner wrist of a palm-up hand resting on a wooden surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline world map on inner wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A palm-up hand rests on a weathered wooden table, with a small black outline map of the continents tattooed on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as a dark grey-black against the skin. The map fills the upper left of the frame, and the hand and fingers take up most of the lower half.

Fine line Other World map Map Continent Outline

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

Sit closer, and mind the gutter, it's been dripping since the rain stopped, which is the kind of thing this city does to make you believe it's still raining. Now. You want the one about Ada Merriman and the ink that ran dry on the Saltmarrow ferry?

Keep reading

She was a chartmaker's girl on Quay Street, sixteen, with a pen nib her father had filed down to a whisker. Every night after the presses shut she'd sit under the bulb at the back of the shop and copy old coastlines from a book with no cover. Nobody had told her the seas were the important part. She drew the land in thin black lines, the way you'd trace a sleeping cat, and left the water white.

One November the bottle went dry halfway through Africa. Ada had no money for more, so she did the only sensible thing a girl with a pen and no ink can do. She finished the rest of the world on the inside of her own wrist, very gently, skipping the bits she'd been too lazy to remember properly. Her mother screamed. Her father said nothing for three days, then bought her a bottle of Indian ink from the chemist on Bell Row, which was the first kind thing he'd done that year.

Here's the bit nobody likes. Ada never once looked at that wrist and thought it was the world. She looked at it and thought, where am I? There was never a dot for her. Forty years later she sailed out past the last printed line of the coast, into the white part she had never drawn, and stood at the rail holding her arm up to the lamplight, checking. The lines didn't show her a thing.

So when you see somebody with a map on their arm, don't ask where they've been. Ask where the ink ran out.