Colour road map design covering a raised forearm and hand against a dark background, with red highways and place names visible.

Road map tattoo on a raised forearm and hand

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A raised forearm and open hand are covered in a detailed road map, with red highways, black and blue roads, and printed place names across the skin. The lines are crisp and the map sits flat across the arm and fingers, with the fingers and palm following the contours of the hand. The palette is mostly muted greens, yellows and blues with bright red roads, set against a near-black background with light falling on the arm.

Forearm Hand Road Lake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harriet Ames had been checking the survey sheets since six, and by nine she had found the thing she had been dreading: a red highway running north out of Morrow Water that no surveyor had ever driven. The county had printed it in 1962. Every revision since had kept it, because the printers were paid by the sheet and nobody wanted to be the one who removed a road.

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She rang Dessa at the office. "Trap road," Dessa said, without looking up from whatever she was eating. "We put them in so rivals can't copy the sheets. Fake town, fake turning, one fake lake. Everyone does it." Harriet asked how many were on the county sheets. Dessa said she'd stopped counting after the third one.

On Thursday Harriet drove out with a flask and the old plates rolling around in the boot. The road ran past a park gate with no keeper, a ferry landing with its chain rusted to the post, and a bakery whose shutters were painted with a loaf and a price nobody had charged in years. At the end there was a cattle grid, then a field of yellow grass sloping down to water the colour of slate. No village. Only a stone bench, and on it someone had carved a name she half recognised: Ames.

She sat for a while. Then she took the pen from her coat, drew the red line through the grass exactly where the ink had always pointed, and wrote the village's name beside the bend, the one that had been dropped from the sheets in 1978. The road was not a lie anymore. It was just a road nobody had come to meet yet.