Watercolour-style world map tattoo in pink, yellow and teal with black script reading Life's a Journey not a Race, on the forearm.

World map and script quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo showing a world map outlined in black, with continents filled in soft pink, yellow and teal and colour running downward in drips. Below the map, black cursive script reads Life's a Journey not a Race, with smooth, even linework. The map sits centrally above the lettering on a plain skin background.

Lettering Forearm World map Continent Quote Script

Find an artist for this

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 hung in the lamp room for nineteen years before the damp got into it. My wife Nell had painted the continents on it the winter we took the post, a wash of coral for the Americas, teal for the sea, yellow for the lands she meant to see. Rain found the seam above the window, and the colours ran down the paper in long thin drips, past Africa, past the Pacific, until the whole world looked like it was weeping quietly onto the floor.

Keep reading

Tamsin arrived from Aberystwyth in September, fifteen and furious at being stuck on a rock with two old people and a foghorn. She wanted to be somewhere else by Christmas. Every evening she timed the sweep of the beam on her phone, muttering that the light was too slow, that the ships passed us faster than the days did. I told her the lamp had been turning since 1887 and had never once hurried.

On the last night of October the fog came in thick as wool, and she climbed the iron stairs two at a time to find me. She had taken the chart down to dry it. "Look," she said, tracing a drip from the top of Greenland to the edge of the frame. "It's all run into one place." I looked at the puddle pooling along the bottom margin, where every continent had bled into the same muddy gold.

"Then it isn't a race," I said, and she laughed, the first time since summer. We hung the chart back up crooked, drips and all, and watched the light sweep out over water none of us would ever need to hurry across.