Traditional colour tattoo on a thigh showing the outline of Louisiana filled with a skull, with teal flowers, leaves and an orange sun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Louisiana state outline with skull and flowers

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of the outline of the state of Louisiana, with a skull shown in its lower section, including a row of visible teeth along the bottom edge. Teal and green flowers with red centres, leaves and an orange sun with black swirl details fill the upper area. Thick black outlines define the shapes, with grey shading on the skull and a warm orange gradient in the sun against a lighter skin background.

Traditional Thigh State outline Skull Teeth Flower Leaf Sun

Find an artist for this

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

The surveyor's chart said the coast ran straight from the Pearl River to the Sabine, but Ruth Abadie had walked it for eleven summers and knew the land lied. Every autumn the marsh gave back less of itself. Old women in Houma said the tide came up through the cane fields with its teeth showing, and that the sea kept a map of its own under the shallows.

Keep reading

She hired Théo Fontenot, who owned a flat-bottomed skiff and a grandfather's habit of spitting for luck, and they went out past Grand Isle at first light. The sun came up orange over the reeds, swirling through the mist like something stirred in a pot. Théo dropped the lead line and hauled it up with sand clinging to the weights. Ruth leaned over the gunwale with her lamp and saw it: a pale ridge in the silt, cut clean, the outline of the parish and beneath it a long grinning jaw. Sea oxeye grew in a ring around the eye sockets, red centres bobbing where the current had planted them.

Théo would not go closer. He said his grandfather had told him the coast was drawn by the drowned, and that you did not correct a drawing once it was finished. Ruth tied a red buoy to the nearest stake and wrote the coordinates in pencil on her wrist, because her notebook was soaking in the bilge.

Back in the office, the clerk frowned at her new survey, then at the teeth along the southern edge, then at her. He stamped it anyway. The map hangs in the courthouse now, its ink still a little damp at the jaw, and every spring someone new asks why the skull is there. Ruth tells them the sea was only being honest about where it had been.