Black and grey fine line tattoos on an arm, with a small white tree on the forearm near the wrist and a map-style design with script covering the upper arm.

Tree and map tattoo on an arm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holding a small silver pendant sits in front of the arm, showing a small white tree tattoo on the forearm near the wrist. The larger tattoo covers the upper arm with a map-style design of hatched mountains, winding lines and small script. The work is rendered in black ink with grey shading, and the composition is close and tightly cropped on the arm.

Fine line Forearm Upper arm Tree Map Script Mountain Pendant Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink thickened in the nib before Oswin Teague had finished the second range of hills. Nine days out of Pellam, the Marra rolled through a grey swell, and the damp had got into everything: his paper, his sleeves, the brass dividers in their velvet case. He bent closer to the lamp. Beyond the last headland he had drawn, nothing was marked but a blank the captain called the Edge, and every sailor aboard had a story about what lay past it.

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On the tenth morning a cook's boy came up the companionway with a bundle of driftwood and, lodged among the splinters, a tree no taller than a hand. It was pale, almost white, its branches carved from something that had soaked for weeks in brine yet kept its shape. Oswin turned it over under the lamp. The wood smelled of resin, not salt, and when he pressed his thumb to the trunk it gave like warm bread. Nobody on the Marra could say where it had come from.

He drew it that night, the tree as he saw it, pinned at the centre of a fresh sheet. Then he began the land around it: the hatched peaks, the winding rivers, the small script of names he could not yet pronounce, letters that climbed upward like vines. By dawn the sheet covered the table and the lamp had burned down to a blue bead. The swell had stopped. Out past the Edge, the sea lay flat as paper.

The captain came down to look and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked for the chart to be sealed and kept under his own hand. Oswin did not argue. Some maps, he had learned, are only honest while the ground they show is still unreached, so he had drawn the road there in pencil, ready to be rubbed out if the sea ever asked for it back.