Fine black line tattoo of the state of California on the side of the torso, with a small patch of redness near the southern edge.

California state outline on skin

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black outline of the American state of California sits on smooth skin beside the edge of a grey and white striped top. The line is even and thin, with the coastline and eastern border drawn as simple unshaded strokes and no fill or shading inside the shape. A small pinkish-red patch sits near the lower edge of the outline, and the rest of the image is neutral skin tone and fabric.

Fine line Other State outline Map Outline

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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

Hold still, child, and let the wax cool before you touch it. The surveyor from Alexandria drew the western edge of the world on a sheet of calfskin, and his hand shook at the bottom of it, where the sea curled back on itself like a dog settling. He had sailed for a year to find that coast and had not found the end of it. So he drew the land as a long tongue running north, with mountains bitten into its side, and he left the inside of it empty, because nobody had walked there yet and he would not lie about what he had not seen.

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His apprentice, a boy named Thessaly who had come from a salt village with one goat and no shoes, asked him why the shape had no colour. The surveyor laughed and said the colour belonged to the people who went. Only the line was true. Everything else was a promise. Thessaly kept that sentence the way a thief keeps a coin, turning it in his mouth on cold nights.

Years later the sheet was rolled up and sent north with a caravan, then south with a bishop, then lost in a flood that took half a library. But a copy had been pricked onto the skin of a sailor who had sworn to sail in the surveyor's wake. On the far end of his voyage, at the place where the line met the sand, he bled a little, and the sailor pressed his thumb there and said, there, that is where the land touched me back.