Single continuous line drawing of the state of Michigan in dark red ink, with the word Home written in script along the bottom, shown as a fine line design sketch.

Michigan outline with Home script

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A continuous single-line outline of the US state of Michigan, including the upper and lower peninsulas, is drawn in dark red-brown ink on a cream background. The word Home is written in looping script beneath the lower peninsula, with the line of the map flowing into the lettering. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the soft vignette around the edges gives the sheet a warm, faded tone.

Fine line State outline Map Home Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mine would close by spring, the foreman said, and Dora Pellinen put the kettle on before she answered him. Her brother's map was still pinned above the stove where he had left it. Matti had drawn the whole state on the back of a feed-store calendar the night before he went south to the rail yards in Flint, and he had done it without lifting the pencil, so the Upper Peninsula hooked off the top like a bent finger and the mitten of the lower one ran down into the lake.

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You can't draw it in one go, she'd told him. Nobody's coastline is that polite. He had grinned and said the lakes were the only honest borders in the country, and a line ought to carry on through them. Now she took the map down and traced it with her thumb, past the Keweenaw where the copper was, down the long curve of Saginaw Bay, and stopped at the word he had written beneath the lower peninsula, looping and certain, like someone who had never once doubted where he was going.

At six the shift whistle went at the works, and she walked down the hill through snow that squeaked under her boots. Ahonen handed out the last envelopes at the gate. Dora counted hers twice, the way Matti always had, and found it correct to the cent. Nothing was owed. The mine was simply finished, and she was the one left holding the pencil.

That night she sat at the table and wrote a letter in her own hand, short as a telegram. She did not say the mine had closed. She said the top of the map was still there if he wanted it, that she had kept the line unbroken from the copper country down to the word, and that he should come and see whether it still held. She folded the page inside the calendar and posted it to Flint before the light came up over the lake.