World map outline tattoo on the side

The inn at Marsa Ghazal has a ceiling of blue tin, and every night the wind lifts a corner of it and lets it fall like someone turning a page. I have not slept well since the wager. You will remember Mr Harrow and his brass compass, how he swore no draughtsman could trace the whole world in one unbroken pen-line without lifting the nib. I told him the Atlantic alone would beat me. He laughed and staked my father's copying press against my pride.

I began at Cape Horn, since the sea there is roughest and a bad line shows least in heavy ink. The line ran north up the Americas like a river finding its own way down a hill, crossed the narrow isthmus where my hand shook, and went on through the ice-stopped north to Greenland and over to the fjords. Africa took me four days. The desert road south of Siwa is the only stretch I could draw without looking, because I had walked it with a lantern and a water skin, and my pen followed the ridges I remembered.

I did not finish. The ink ran dry somewhere off the coast of Java, and I had not reached Australia. Harrow came to the press that morning, looked at the sheet for a long time, and said the wager was his to lose. He paid me the full stake anyway, because a line that never lifts has already crossed everything it claims.

Write soon. Tell Father the press is safe.