Black and grey tattoo of a heart inside an outline of Oklahoma on pale skin, with bold linework and soft shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart inside an Oklahoma outline

Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a heart set inside a larger outline of the US state of Oklahoma. The heart has a bold, soft-edged black line with smudged shading along its inner edge, while the state outline is a cleaner, thinner line with a jagged southern border. The photograph is taken straight on against pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Heart State outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Red River would not hold still for me, Ada, and I have stopped asking it to. Three weeks we chained the southern line along its bends, and every time the water shifted a furlong the state shifted with it, so that by Thursday the boundary we had pegged on Monday lay somewhere in a cottonwood thicket with a heron standing on it. The men call the jag in the border the Devil's stitching. I call it honest, which is more than I can say for the maps out of Washington.

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I drew the state on the plat anyway, the long panhandle and the notched shoulders, and then, because nobody was watching and the lamp was low, I put a heart inside it, right where the territory line folds back on itself. It is a poor heart. My hand shook from the cold. Hazel Tolliver from the stage office said it looked more like a kettle. She is wrong, and I told her so, and she laughed at me the way you laughed at me in March.

The chief clerk found it Friday and threatened to send the sheet back with a note. Instead he pinned it up in the land office in Guthrie, under the lamp, and now every farmer who comes in to dispute a quarter section stops to look at it. One of them asked whether it was a tally of the dead. I said it was a tally of the living, and he didn't argue, which surprised me.

So come and see it, Ada. The river has moved again since I started this letter and I expect the heart is in Texas by now, which would be a scandal. But the state is only the outline. The part that matters is the part I drew with my own bad hand, and it is still in the room where anyone can find it.