Close view of a subtle brown world map tattoo on the inner wrist and lower forearm, with the open palm and fingers visible above it.

World map on the inner wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The image shows the inside of a hand and lower forearm with a world map design on the wrist. The continents are filled in with a flat, warm brown ink that sits close to the skin tone, with little visible shading or fine detail. The hand fills most of the frame against a plain grey and dark background, with the map placed in the lower half of the picture.

Forearm World map Continent Map Africa

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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

Rain had come in sideways off the river since seven, and by ten the tarpaulins over Claygate market sagged like wet sails. Marian Doyle kept her trestle under the arch, where the drips fell in a steady line, selling what nobody else wanted: old atlases, road maps folded to the wrong county, and a hundred sheets of foxed paper she had bought from house clearances and never got round to sorting.

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The boy came in from the wet with his hood up and asked for the world. Not a globe, he said, a map he could hang over his bed. She pulled out a 1950s atlas whose endpapers had gone the colour of weak tea. He turned the pages with one finger, stopping where Africa spilled toward the bottom margin, its western bulge marked by a thumbprint of old damp. 'Is it really that shape?' he asked. 'Near enough,' she said. 'If you've never been, it's exactly that shape.'

He counted out coins from a sandwich bag and came up forty pence short, and she let it go. While he waited for the rain to ease, she found a loose sheet at the bottom of the box, a pencilled outline of the same continents with the ink gone brown at the edges. Her father's handwriting ran along one margin: where the ships turned. She had never known what he meant by it. Folding the sheet, she decided she would keep it.

When the boy had gone, she ran her thumb down the wet plastic cover of the atlas, following the coast from the top of the page round to the horn, the way her father used to, slowly, as if the sea might be listening. The rain kept on. Under her thumb the line smudged a little, then held.