Black and white photo of a raised arm with a road map tattoo across the forearm and hand, set against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Road map tattoo on a raised forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a raised arm and open hand against a dark backdrop. A road map design with fine black lines, town labels and place names covers the forearm and extends onto the back of the hand. The lighting is soft and directional, which makes the map lines stand out clearly across the skin.

Forearm Hand Map Road Hand Arm

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

The survey sheet came back from the printers with a town that did not exist. Mr Oswin Tallis had walked the ridge road in a wet October, counting culverts and bridges, and when he reached the fork where the creek bent under the larches he wrote down Sallow Reach, because that was what the shepherd called it, and nobody had ever asked the shepherd to spell it.

Keep reading

The county took the sheet as gospel. A dozen clerks checked the distances and not one checked the names. By spring the bus timetable said Sallow Reach, the petrol pump at the crossroads had a hand-painted board saying Sallow Reach, and a young woman named Ivy Penhallow, who had come up to keep the post office for her aunt, wrote home to her mother that she could find the place on every map in the county except the one in her own head.

Tallis came back forty years later with a rubber and a ruler, meaning to put things right. He stood at the fork in the rain and found a schoolhouse there, a bell on a timber post, and eleven children who had been born to the name and called it home without a flicker of doubt. He tried to rub out the letters on his old sheet and found the paper gone soft and grey under his thumb, the way old roads do when everyone keeps driving them.

In the end he took a pencil and drew one more thin line from the fork, a lane no surveyor would ever sign off, running straight off the edge of the paper towards the hills. He wrote nothing beside it, and went home the long way round.