Black and grey fine line tattoo of topographic contour lines across the back of a hand and knuckles, photographed against a plain light background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Topographic contour lines across the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a clenched hand with thin black contour lines running across the back of the hand and over the knuckles, resembling a topographic map. The lines are fine and mostly unshaded, with the spacing tightening and loosening to suggest rises and dips in the terrain. The plain pale background keeps the focus on the linework and the curve of the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass theodolite has fogged again, so I have been drawing the hill from memory by candlelight, which is a poor way to survey anything. Mr Achterberg from the office says a contour is only honest if you have walked it with a chain in one hand and a level in the other. I told him the hill does not care for honesty. It rises where it likes and falls where it pleases, and the lines I draw are only the bargain we strike with it.

Keep reading

Each line is a height above the sea, one step up from the last, every step the same weight as a boot on wet bracken. Where the lines crowd together the ground is steep and where they spread out it is kind. Near the old quarry they bunch so tight the paper goes dark. I have never told my wife that I measured the valley floor twice in one wet week, because the second time I found the stream had moved a yard east in the night, and I could not bring myself to correct the sheet.

Tomorrow I will fold this map into my coat and carry it down to Hathersage. Mother will ask whether the lines are right. I will say they are as right as a man can make a mountain, which is to say they are a promise that every hollow has a floor and every peak a top, and that the water always finds the lowest of them. Then I will lay the sheet on the table and show her the dip where the old cottage stood, a line drawn twice, once for the hill and once for us.

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