Collage of three fine line tattoos: two thin black bands around a forearm near the wrist, an outline map of Australia on skin, and Roman numerals XCVI VI VIII on a forearm.

Three fine line tattoos on arms and skin

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage has three panels. The left panel shows two thin black parallel bands encircling a forearm near the wrist, beside a gold wristwatch. The centre panel shows a single-line outline of Australia in dark ink on pale skin, with the body part not clearly visible. The right panel shows the Roman numerals XCVI VI VIII in small, fine black lettering on a forearm, with a black sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Other Band Map Roman numeral Numeral Outline Wrist Watch

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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

The chart reaches Hallow Quay wrapped in oilcloth, and the harbourmaster's clerk hands it across the counter without looking up, because nobody in the town has asked for a coastline that far from home in forty years. You carry it to the back office, weight the corners with pewter inkwells, and unroll it under the lamp. The southern shore wanders off the edge of the paper in a line that starts and stops, as if the hand kept lifting to check the distance.

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Your task is to copy it fair before the next packet sails. All week the tar smoke drifts in from the slipway and the bell at the pierhead rings the tides, and each night the coast looks a little more ragged than the night before. You begin to suspect the surveyor drew it not from sight but from a letter, a description read aloud on a deck in the rain, with the wind taking half the words.

On the last evening the clerk's daughter brings you cocoa and peers over your shoulder at the little teardrop sitting below the great shoulder of the land, drawn with one hard stroke as though the pen had wanted it nearer the ink than the sea. She asks what it is. You tell her it is the place where a man stopped writing to his wife. She says no, it is where the line finally came home.

You leave that teardrop until last. When the copy is done you fold the original away and set your own sheet to dry on the rack by the stove, and you find you cannot say, looking at both, which of the two lines you trust more.