Fine line outline of the state of Florida with a small red heart near the southern tip, tattooed on the inner forearm below a traditional style panther tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Florida outline with red heart on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A thin black outline of the state of Florida sits on the inner forearm, with a small solid red heart marking a spot near the southern peninsula. Above it, a larger traditional style panther head in black, grey and yellow sits on the arm. The photo is taken straight on with flat indoor lighting and a dark background.

Fine line Forearm Map Heart Panther

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

When the sea took the lowlands, the people left on the high ridge kept the old map in a tin box, because it was the only thing that still agreed with the land. Its shape was wrong now. The panhandle lay under grey water, but the long finger of the peninsula still pointed south. Near its tip someone had pressed a drop of red wax, shaped like a heart, and the ridge folk had argued about it for three generations. Ada Lund, who was nineteen and tired of arguing, took the box and a sack of dried mullet and set off to find out.

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The walk took nine days. Sawgrass grew taller than her head and the mangrove roots tangled into walls that she had to climb or cut through. A panther walked ahead of her most mornings, pale gold in the reeds, and it swam the black channels without slowing. The old women said such cats were left over from before the water, that they remembered the paths. Ada did not trust the old women, but she followed the cat anyway, because the cat never once looked back to see whether she was coming.

On the ninth evening the wax heart met her in a clearing of rusted pumps. A stilt house stood there with a lamp burning in the window, though no smoke rose from the chimney and no boat was tied below. Inside, a table held a second map, drawn in ink that had not faded, and a note in a hand she recognised from the box: Come down when the water stops. I will keep the light. Ada read it twice before she understood that the writer was her great-grandmother, who had walked south forty years ago with a lamp and never come home.

Ada pressed her thumb into the wax on the windowsill and left a print beside the old one. When she stepped outside the lamp went out. The panther waited at the edge of the water, then turned north without a sound. When Ada looked back from the first rise, the house was dark and the tide was already filling the footprints she had made.