Close view of a small solid black world map silhouette tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a person in a red polka dot shirt and black trousers behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small world map tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black silhouette of the continents sits on the inner forearm, close to the wrist. The shapes are filled with flat black ink, with no visible shading or fine detail within the landmasses. The arm is shown against a dark background with a red polka dot shirt sleeve and a metal belt buckle at the top of the frame, so the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Forearm World map Continent Map Silhouette

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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

You reach Mrs Pardoe's on the last bus from Ramsgate, when the rain has thinned to a fine salt that gets into the seams of your coat. She takes your case without asking and sets it on the bottom stair, where it leaves a damp square on the lino. "Breakfast is half seven," she says, "and the bath water runs cold after nine, so don't dawdle."

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The hall has a map. It isn't framed like the prints in the lounge. It has been pencilled straight onto the wallpaper above the telephone table, the whole world in grey lead, with the continents filled solid in black ink from a nib pen, and a few of them have drawing pins pushed into their edges. Mrs Pardoe dusts round it every morning. Her husband drew it, she tells you, the winter he came home from the Cape run and couldn't sleep. He never got the scale right. Greenland is far too big for what it ought to be.

You stay three weeks. Each evening you walk the front to the pier and back, past the same postcards in the newsagent's window, all of them the same grey harbour under the same grey sky. On the last night you lift the telephone table and count the pins. There are eleven. Beside each one, in tiny capitals, is a name and a date, and the last is yours, written in her careful hand that morning.

In the morning you carry your case down the stairs yourself. She asks where you are bound. You put your thumb on the ink at the bottom of the map, where the land runs out into nothing, and tell her you haven't decided yet.