Fine black outline tattoo of the world map wrapping around the inside of a wrist, with a raised fist and red nails above it.

World map outline on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A clenched hand is raised towards the top of the frame, with the inner wrist showing a thin black outline of the world map. The continents of the Americas, Europe and Africa are visible, drawn with simple single-weight linework and no shading. The plain pale background and soft even lighting keep the focus on the tattoo and the red nail polish.

Fine line Forearm World map Continent Map Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dunmore's Travelling Wonders had one tent left, and Ada Thorne had three of its four poles bolted together with baling wire when the boy came to her with his sleeve rolled up. 'It won't come off,' he said. He had scrubbed at it all week with lye and sand, as if the map were grease from the wagon axles. She looked at the Americas, the bulge of Africa, the spill of Europe above it, and remembered her grandfather inking it on him at a fair in Hull for a shilling and a pint.

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The map was a promise, the old man used to say, that every coast on it had a tent standing somewhere on its shore. Nobody had kept it. The horses went to the knacker at Penrith, the lion died in a field outside Carlisle, and the band went to work in a bingo hall in Doncaster. Only the boy still believed the lines would take him somewhere, because nobody had yet told him they were only ink.

Ada took a stub of pencil from her apron and drew a thin line across the blue of his palm, from the thumb to the little finger, joining the old continents to nothing at all. 'The sea's the one place we never walked,' she said. 'You go and walk it, then. You're the only part of this show that still works.'

He left at first frost, past the gate where the horses used to stand. Behind him the poles stood in the wet grass like the masts of a fleet that had never sailed, and when the sun came up over the hedge his wrist was pale and clean, but the map was still there, pressed into the skin where he could not wash it away.