Fine line black ink tattoo of a world map outline on the inside of a wrist, with the hand raised in front of a paper map.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

World map outline on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand and wrist are shown in front of a large paper world map. A small world map outline is tattooed on the inner wrist, drawn in thin, single black lines with no shading. The continents sit centrally on the wrist, and the background map provides a busy but muted contrast to the simple tattoo.

Fine line Forearm World map Map Continent Outline Globe

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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

Thessa had drawn the Great Sea wrong for thirty years, and she wanted it fixed before the caravan left for Sardis. She pressed a stylus into my palm to show the weight she meant. "Keep the lines thin," she said. "A line you can read from a hand's length away is a line that lies."

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I spent three nights at the bench in the room above the salt warehouse, copying the coast from a sailor's account scratched onto a broken jar. Every harbour I could not confirm, I left as a dot. The Sea of Reeds gave me the most trouble, because the sailor had counted his days wrongly and his stars were the wrong colour for the season. I pricked the rim of the bronze with a compass point until my eyes ached, and the wind off the harbour rattled the shutters like someone impatient to be let in.

On the last night I drew the whole world as it was known, the lands and the water and nothing beyond them. The edge of the bronze ran off where the Ocean curled back on itself, so I left that edge empty and wrote nothing there, since nobody had ever come back to tell me what was past it.

At dawn Thessa ran her thumb along the lines and said they were fine enough to carry in a pocket. She sold the piece to a merchant who wanted the world small. By the time the caravan reached Sardis, he had it cut into a silver band no wider than two fingers, and he wore it on the inside of his wrist, where a man checks his pulse before he sleeps.