Amorphous hydrogenated carbon (a–C:H) is introduced as a constituent of a two–layer resist system for lithography with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) operating in air. The resist is made up of a thin electron sensitive and chemically amplified top resist (≤50 nm) anda–C:H as a thick conducting and etchable bottom resist. In this setup the bottom resist acts as the counter electrode allowing in principle operation on insulating substrates. We show that it is possible to generate structures with high aspect ratios by transfering the developed top resist patterns by means of oxygen reactive ion etching (RIE) into the bottom resist and halogen RIE into silicon substrates. Linewidths between 100 and 50 nm have been observed in the bottom resist as well as in the substrates. ©1995 American Institute of Physics.