Two open palms with fine black line tattoos of the world map, one showing the Americas and the other Europe, Africa and Asia, on a dark background.

World map outline tattoos on both palms

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms face the camera, each with a black outline tattoo of a continent map. The left palm shows North and South America, and the right palm shows Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against the skin, with a silver ring on one finger and a blurred red patterned background.

Fine line Hand Other World map Continent Map Hand Palm Outline

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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

You are the only one left in the print room when the bell on Dock Road strikes twelve, and the plate for the Atlas of Quiet Harbours is still wrong. The proof has to be pulled before the van comes at six. Mr Okafor's pencil marks run along the coast of Africa like a nervous dog's tracks, and the ink you mixed this afternoon has gone the colour of wet slate.

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The old engraver, Hatherley, cut these plates forty years ago with a magnifier strapped to his brow. Nobody checked his work against anything but his memory of the sea. Tonight you lay the proof over the lamp and see the Americas leaning east, as if a thumb had pushed them out of true. Behind you the presses tick as they cool. Outside, a lorry grinds up the hill toward the Mersey, and its headlights cross the wall and are gone.

In the bottom drawer you find Hatherley's ledger. Between the tide tables is a single sheet with a small pencilled harbour on the western bulge of Africa, labelled with a woman's name, Edith Lund, and beneath it a note in a shaking hand: leave this one where it falls. You think about the coastline you have spent three weeks trying to correct, and how many people have carried a line like that in their pockets without ever asking whose hand drew it.

At five you pull the proof clean, and the coast stays exactly as it was. You sign the margin with your own initials, small, beneath his. When the van pulls up you wipe the ink from your fingers, but the black stays under your nails until noon.