A Tolkien-Style Map of the Whole World: The Inked World, a Zoomable Map of the Modern Earth in the Style of a Hand-Inked Fantasy Map, Generated from Open Data

I describe a Tolkien-style map of the whole world: a Tolkien-inspired map of the modern Earth. Hand-drawn maps, with rows of inked mountains, clusters of tiny trees, coasts traced with thin parallel lines and names lettered in red, are made for one place at one scale. This is a zoomable map of the whole world in that style, generated in the reader's browser from open data: OpenStreetMap vector tiles from OpenFreeMap and the AWS Terrain Tiles elevation model. Mountains and hills are placed on the highest points of a nested grid of cells, where the relief clears a bar that grows with the size of the cell on the ground, from about 477 m for cells of 237 km at zoom 2 to about 130 m for cells of 311 m at zoom 11. Because the highest point of a cell is also the highest point of one of its children, peaks persist as one zooms in and new ones fade in between them. A spacing rule keeps glyphs off plain slopes, a ruggedness test keeps peaks off high flat plateaus and deserts, and a thinning rule keeps great ranges readable. Between the ranges, dunes, grass, rainforest, taiga and ice glyphs follow the RESOLVE Ecoregions biomes; trees fill OpenStreetMap woods, nothing is drawn on water, and names are placed before glyphs: 194 countries along fitted or hand-drawn curves, and 167 hand-placed oceans, seas, ranges, deserts and regions, cut to fit their text at every zoom. Heritage sites from Wikidata appear as small drawings ranked by their Wikipedia coverage, towns fill with houses along their real streets close in, peaks above the snow line carry snow, and animals, whales and sailing ships decorate the map in their real ranges and lanes. Every visual parameter is interpolated over zoom, so the map reads as one drawing from the globe to a single hill. I set out the rules, show the result from the world to the Lake District, and discuss the limits. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/ink-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ink-map. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/ink-map/. Data: map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0), via OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles; elevation from the AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen; SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1); RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 (CC BY 4.0); Wikidata (CC0); CLIWOC ship logbooks; Natural Earth (public domain); ONS Local Authority District boundaries (OGL v3.0). Fonts under the SIL Open Font License. The archive holds no tile data. Inspired by the general style of Tolkien's hand-drawn maps; not connected with or endorsed by the Tolkien Estate.