Black lettering reading Once you go black you never go back sits above an outline of Africa with a heart and the words I AFRICA inside, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Script quote and Africa outline on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo across the upper back shows handwritten script above a single-line outline of the African continent. Inside the outline, a small heart symbol sits above the capital letters I and AFRICA in block print. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the skin around the design looks reddened, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Lettering Back Script Quote Africa Heart Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The outline came off the school atlas in one pencil stroke, because my father said a coastline drawn twice is a coastline lying. He ran his finger round the bulge at the top and told me to keep the lead moving. I was nine. The harbour at Lowestoft smelt of diesel and wet rope, and the net loft was where he kept his chart table under a bulb with a cracked shade.

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Years later I was the one at that table, inking coastlines for a publisher in London who wanted them clean enough to print on tea towels. Every continent got the same care. Africa took me three weeks, mostly because the Gulf of Guinea kept wanting to curl. I drew a small heart in the margin over the Sahara, a joke for nobody, and my father found it when he came up the stairs to check my work. He did not rub it out. He held the sheet to the bulb and said the rocks were in the right place, so the heart could stay.

He pinned the drawing above the stove, where the damp could get at it. When he died, a man with a van cleared the loft for scrap and I took the chart from the wall before he could roll it up. The pencil had gone soft, and the heart had bled into a grey smudge like a thumbprint on glass. I keep it in a biscuit tin with the tide tables now. Every spring I trace the coastline again in fresh ink, tight and unbroken, so the shape holds, and I leave the margin blank.