Fine line black outline tattoos of a US state map shape on the side of two fingers of a hand, with grey painted nails.

Two small outline map tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand resting on a dark leather surface, with two small black outline tattoos on adjoining fingers. The shape on the left resembles the US state of California, and the shape on the right is an angular outline with a jagged top edge. The thin, even linework is in black ink on pale skin, set against a blurred striped top and grey nail polish.

Fine line Hand State outline Finger tattoo Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's kind tonight but the tent's still cold. You want the one about the two towns, not the lion. The lion's only a lion. Old Tobias Quill ran the Marvellini Brothers Circus, and by the year the big top had more patches than paint, he had just two towns left on his route, one on each side of the great mountains. He kept them on paper folded soft as cloth, and he drew them with a stub of carpenter's pencil the way other men drew saints.

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Every winter he sat in the caravan under the paraffin lamp and traced the first place, the long curl of its coast running down past the orange groves, then the jagged saw-teeth of the second, where snow sat on the peaks until June. Between them lay three hundred miles of dust and a bad road. His daughter Nell could walk a wire at forty feet, but she couldn't abide the sight of a map. She called his drawings a sick man's bedtime stories. The spring the elephant died she went off with a juggler from Bristol and took the good lamp with her.

Tobias didn't chase her. He did the sums instead: the petrol, the fodder, the canvas. When the last town fell away in the rain, he took his pencil and drew one line only, straight across the paper from one coast to the other, and beside it wrote in his cramped hand, "Where we were, and where we'll be." Then he folded the map into his coat and drove the old lorry east until the road gave out.

Eleven years later, Nell came back on foot with a child on her hip and no lamp at all. She found the caravan rusting in a field of thistles and the paper still pinned above the bunk. She traced the line with a fingertip, the way you'd check a sleeper was breathing. Then she kept walking, and we've been following her line ever since.