Four-step photo of a temporary tattoo, a blue watercolour USA outline with lettering reading land that I love, being applied to an upper arm in lettering style.

Temporary USA map tattoo applied to upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The photo runs in four panels showing a temporary transfer being applied: a blue watercolour USA outline with white hand lettering is peeled from its backing, placed on the upper arm, pressed with a cloth and then having its backing removed. The lettering is white script knocked out of a blue wash, with the wash giving a mottled texture across the map shape. The arm sits against a plain wall and wooden floor, with a blue marl top visible at the sleeve.

Lettering Upper arm Map Lettering Temporary tattoo Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okafor painted the map on the side of the lead wagon the spring the elephant died, and nobody had the heart to scrub it off. Blue wash for the whole country, white script running through the middle where the states crowd together: land that I love. I was nineteen and sign-writing was the one job the show still paid for in cash, so I was the one up the ladder with a brush between my teeth, trying to make the g's loop the way they did on the feed store signs back home.

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By the third summer the big top had more patches than canvas, and the crowds in towns like Pell Creek, Missouri, numbered in the dozens. Mrs Dell, who owned what was left of us, stopped hoping the paint would sell tickets and started printing transfers instead. We sold them at the gate for a dollar, a blue outline of the whole country on a sheet of backing paper, and I spent my evenings with the kitchen scissors cutting out the states so the children would have something to take home. The white lettering was always the hardest part to keep even.

On the final night in Pell Creek a boy with a sticky bag of popcorn asked me to put one on him. I pressed it down, laid a damp tea towel over it the way Mrs Dell had shown me, and counted to thirty before I peeled the backing away. The wash came up mottled and uneven, exactly like the wagon, and the boy ran off shouting that he'd been to every state in one go.

The wagon went to a scrapyard in Joplin the following week, still carrying the map, and I kept the last sheet of transfers folded in my coat. I have never gone further than a county line since. Some nights I stick one to the kitchen window in Leeds and watch the light come through the blue, the words holding on for a few days before the rain takes them and the country sits exactly where I left it.