Blue watercolour-style world map tattoo on the inner forearm, with the continents left as bare skin.

World map tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a world map on the inner forearm, with the landmasses left as unshaded skin and the surrounding oceans filled with soft blue shading. The edges of the blue fade into the skin in a wash-like effect, with darker blue and black accents along the coastlines. The composition wraps across the forearm and is photographed straight on against a grey floor.

Forearm World map Continent Ocean Map

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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

Dear Tomas, the first batch is in the oven and the street outside is still the colour of dishwater, so forgive the smudge on this page. Mum's old chart of the world is still pinned above the proving racks, the one you tore the corner off when you were nine. Dad always said the land on it was just sitting there being land, and only the sea was worth the trouble of colouring.

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Last night Mrs Okonedo came in for her Sunday rye and asked why we kept such a dull map. I told her it wasn't dull. Look at the edges, I said, all that blue bleeding out into the paper as if someone had breathed on it and the breath had stayed. She said the ocean was just the bit you had to go around. I didn't argue. I was thinking of your pencil lines, the coasts you drew in black before you ever touched a brush.

So I went up to the attic and found your tin of inks, the ones with the cracked lids. Blue number four is nearly gone, but there was enough for a wash. I wet the brush and worked outward from the shore, keeping the land pale and letting the water go soft and then darker where the depth must be. It took me most of the night. My hands smell of ink and yeast, which Dad would have found very funny.

The post van comes at nine, so I am folding the map into this envelope along with the torn corner. Put it on a wall somewhere with the sea around it. Then tell me which shore you're standing on, and I'll try to match the blue to it.