Fine line black outline of the state of California with a small red heart near its northern border, tattooed on the inner forearm.

California outline with red heart on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a single-line outline of the US state of California, drawn in thin black ink with a simple, unshaded finish. A small solid red heart sits near the top of the outline, on the northern edge of the state, and a thin line connects the heart to the coastline. The skin is pale and the photo is taken straight on, with the design filling the centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm State outline Map Heart

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie noticed the heart was in the wrong place only after the proof had dried on the rack. Mr Pell had asked for the red stamp at the northern edge of the state, where the straight border met the coast, but she had dabbed it a good inch south, close to the bend where the lines of the mountains ran into the blank. She held the sheet to the window above the Bristol docks and considered whether to tell him at all.

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Her father had engraved charts for the shipping lines for forty years and had never once misplaced a harbour. He would have reprinted it without a word. But Pell had not come to the print room for a chart. He had come for a single outline, pen-thin, with nothing shaded inside it, and he had stood by the press with his hat in both hands while she traced it freehand from a tin of old charts gone soft with damp.

'It's where I was standing,' Pell said when she showed him, not looking at the heart but at the long line running from it down to the sea. 'The day the letter came. Up in the hills with the wind coming off the snow, and the whole coast below me like a rope I could follow.' He took the proof, folded it once, and slid it into his coat. 'Leave it where it is.'

She did. The next morning she wiped the red stamp clean with a rag and turned the sheet to the light. Then, before the ink could set, she dabbed it back exactly where she had first put it, a good inch south, and wrote his name in the margin in her father's neat capitals.