Black and grey world map tattoo wrapping around an upper arm, with continents in soft ink-wash shading and fine outline lines.

World map tattoo wrapped around an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A world map with continents and oceans is tattooed around the upper arm, with the landmasses filled in solid black and soft grey wash. Thin black linework traces coastlines and dotted lines run along the lower edge. The map wraps across the curve of the arm against a white brick wall, with a striped sleeve visible at the right edge.

Blackwork Upper arm World map Continent Map Globe Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cartographer's widow kept the atlas on the kitchen table, though nobody in Harrow Lane had opened it since the funeral. Her son came round on a Sunday in March with a tin of biscuits and found her cutting out the shapes of the continents from old card, one by one, with the good scissors. She said the globe in the parlour had gone soft in the middle and the map had to be moved somewhere it could be seen. He asked where. She pointed at her own upper arm.

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He thought she was joking until she rolled up her cardigan sleeve and showed him the ring of ink, inky grey where the land had been coloured, black where the sea would have been left bare. Some of the coastlines were drawn in one thin line that ran off the skin and came back. The little dashes along the bottom edge were, she said, the weather coming in from the south. Her husband had done it at the kitchen sink with a needle and a jar of Indian ink, the summer their daughter went to Lisbon and did not write.

He stayed for tea. Before he left, she asked him to find Lisbon on the arm. He turned her wrist gently and traced the curve of the coast with his thumb, slowly, until the ink stopped being land and became skin again. She said that was right. Then she gave him the scissors and told him to cut out the Atlantic, because it was the only part that had never been any use to anybody.