Black world map tattoo on the inner forearm of a woman in a white dress, who is holding hands with a man in a dark suit.

World map tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a small world map tattoo in solid black ink on the inside of a forearm. The continents are rendered as a simplified silhouette with no shading, and the map sits across the forearm just above the wrist. The background shows a white dress and bouquet on one side and a dark suit and white shirt cuff on the other, with the two people's hands clasped.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the nets. I'll tell you about Josiah Penhale, who drew the whole round world on a chart-house wall in Porthrenna and never once sailed past the breakwater to see it.

Keep reading

His chart-house stood up by the fish market, low and smelling of linseed and tar. Every boat that went out left with a folded copy of his work tucked in its oilskin, and every boat that came home had a salt stain on its chart where the sea had got at it. He cut each continent from a brass stencil and inked it solid, no shading at all. Shading, he said, was for people who thought the land had something to hide. The sea was honest. Land was only the shape the water had given up.

The winter his wife died, Josiah stopped opening the shutters. The boats went out on blind copies, and the men began to grumble that the coast looked wrong on paper. Then his grandson Caleb came up the hill with a pot of black ink and a stencil he'd nicked from the drawer. He wouldn't say why. He just pressed the brass to the lintel above the door and dabbed the shape of Africa in, then the Americas, then the long hook of Asia, working the whole world onto one small patch of stone.

Josiah came out the next morning and stood a long while in the cold. Then he said nothing, only lifted his own hand and laid the palm flat over the ink. From then on, every crew that left Porthrenna touched that stone before they cast off, so the world would be the first thing they carried and the last thing they lost sight of.

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