A raised hand and forearm covered in a road map design with red routes and place names, set against a dark background, with the design appearing to sit on the skin.

Road map tattoo across hand and forearm

Hand · Colour · Photo

A raised hand and forearm are shown against a dark, softly lit backdrop. A detailed road map covers the skin, with red route lines, blue water features, green park areas and printed place names such as Klamath Falls. The map is rendered in muted natural tones, and the design follows the contours of the fingers, palm and wrist.

Hand Forearm Map Road Hand Forearm

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

Dear Marguerite, I finally got the road atlas off the dashboard and onto my arm, though you'll say I've gone soft. The man at the parlour in Medford worked from a 1990s Thomas Guide, and every time he pressed the needle near my wrist he muttered about the refuge boundary being drawn wrong. I told him the refuge was never on any map that agreed with itself. Pink lines run up my palm where the highway used to be, the one we drove the night the truck overheated outside Klamath Falls and you walked two miles for a radiator hose and came back grinning like a fool. I didn't ask for the hose story. The artist just liked the cross-hatching of the wetlands.

Keep reading

You'll want to know if it hurt. It did, mostly along the inside of the forearm where the skin is thin and the roads bunch together like veins. Around the knuckles the blue lakes went in quicker, almost a relief. I sat with my hand palm-up on a folded towel while he worked, and the whole arm felt like a page being turned slowly for me.

So when you come up in June, don't bother with the phone. Just hold my wrist and trace where we'd have turned off. I'll know the way by heart, and so, now, will anyone who looks at me long enough to read it. Your brother, Tom.