Watercolour-style tattoo of the Alaska outline in teal and pink with an outlined heart and a dotted line, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alaska map with heart on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of the outline of Alaska, filled with loose teal and red-pink washes that bleed past the black linework in places. A black outlined heart sits within the shape, and a dotted line trails off to the left. The piece is photographed close up on the side of the ribs, with a blue top at the upper edge of the frame.

Ribs Map Heart Dotted line State outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways across the market since eight, and Mae had given up on keeping her prints dry. She pinned a sheet of cartridge paper to the awning frame and tipped a jar of teal over the top edge, watching it run toward the ragged northern coast she had penciled in that morning. The wash crept past the lines, which was the point, or at least the point her grandfather had made in the last letter he ever sent her, folded inside the lid of a tin of watercolours. A coastline is never a line, he'd written. It's only the place where the sea stops arguing.

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"You'll ruin it," called Dev from the fishmonger's next door, hosing down his slabs of ice. "Paper like that drinks everything."

"That's the idea," Mae said, and she painted the red into the middle of the state the way some people set a fire in a grate, slowly and with care, letting it spread until the edges went soft and rosy and mean nothing. She left a small white gap in the centre for the heart, which she would ink last with a fine nib once the wash had dried, if it ever dried in this weather.

A woman came under the awning around four, shaking an umbrella that had given up. She didn't want a name on the paper or a date. She wanted the shape, the heart, and a dotted route that began at the wet edge and ran west across the sheet. Mae traced it for her in pencil first, dot by dot, and the woman watched each one as though counting something she had lost and found again.

When the ink went down, the heart came out crisp and black against the bleeding teal. Mae slid the print into a plastic sleeve and handed it over. The woman tucked it under her coat and walked off toward the car park, and behind her the dotted line that Mae had left running off the paper's edge kept going on the wet pavement, fading a little more with each step, until the rain took it altogether.