Black script lettering reading Buckeyes overlaps a red outline of the state of Ohio on the side of the ribs.

Buckeyes script with Ohio state outline

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the side of a torso, with the word Buckeyes written in black cursive script across the left side. A red outlined map of the state of Ohio overlaps the end of the word on the right. The linework is clean and even, and the lettering is shaded in solid black with the state outline in a single bright red line.

Lettering Ribs State outline Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Past the marsh road, where the reeds leaned over the water, Hollis Carr kept the light at Marrow Point on the south shore of Lake Erie. His wife had gone to her sister's in the spring and not come back, so he climbed the iron stairs alone every evening. Each October he walked the orchard edge and filled his coat pockets with the glossy brown nuts that dropped from the big trees, the ones with a pale eye on them.

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His daughter Wren, who was seven, asked him why he carried them. He said a man out on black water needs something in his hand that is not a rope. So the buckeyes went out to the fishing boats, one in every pocket, and the lake kept none of those boats that winter.

The storm came in the second week of November, so thick the beam could not reach the rocks. Hollis trimmed the wick until his hands blistered, and out beyond the breakwater a boat with a torn sail showed one lantern, then none. Wren stood at the rail with her father's coat around her knees and counted the minutes aloud, because counting was the only way she knew to keep the light going.

At dawn a stranger rowed in, a young man from Sandusky with salt crusted in his beard. He pressed a buckeye into Hollis's palm and asked what the light was called. Marrow Point, Hollis said. The man took a stub of pencil from his shirt and, on the back of his chart, drew the outline of Ohio, crooked at the top and ragged along the south, then traced it again in red. That, he said, was the shape of home. Wren ran her finger around it, and the nut stayed warm in her fist all day.