Black linework tattoo of a topographic map with contour lines covering the upper arm and shoulder of a person in a navy vest top.

Topographic map tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a topographic map, drawn as dense, wavy black contour lines around hills and hollows. Dashed and solid lines mark boundaries and paths, with small place labels written along the lower arm. The design is in black ink only, with clean, even linework on a plain background.

Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Map Landscape

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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 reunion was in the old geography room, and the contour map was still on the wall where Mr Pollard had pinned it in 1994, its corners gone brown as tea. Nobody had taken it down. Gemma found the dotted line first, the one that ran from the stile to the bottom of Sallow Dene, and she pressed her thumb on it as if the paper might still be warm.

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We had all walked that route on the same wet Thursday, sixteen of us in borrowed anoraks, following the boundary wall that Pollard swore was older than the church. He made us count the rings on the hills. Three rings was a steep bit, he said, and five meant you would get your feet wet. Gemma got hers wet up to the knee in the hollow they called Dead Man's Pool, and she laughed all the way back down to the minibus.

Now she was a dentist in Leeds with two boys who would not stand still, and Tom sold insurance from a unit by the ring road. I had mostly stopped counting things. We stood in front of the map with our paper cups and worked out where we had each been when the rain came, and it turned out we had all been on different slopes of the same hill, each sure we were alone on it.

When the caretaker came to lock up, Gemma asked if she could take the map down. He said it belonged to nobody, so she rolled it under her arm like a pennant. I expect it hangs on her hall wall now, the boundary wall running past the coats, where her boys trace the paths with their fingers. I still know exactly where the track bends.