Fine line tattoo of the state of Michigan on the arm, its outline filled with mandala and floral patterns and a small red heart in the lower peninsula.

Michigan outline with mandala filling

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows both peninsulas of the state of Michigan as outlines, each filled with ornamental mandala, floral and swirl patterns. The linework is thin and black, with some stippled dotwork shading and a single small red heart near the centre of the lower peninsula. The map fills most of the frame against plain skin, with a light blue fabric visible at the edges.

Fine line Botanical Other Map State outline Mandala Floral Swirl Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell Oster had not spoken to his brother across the straits for nine winters, not since their mother's quilts were divided by lamplight and one of them turned out to be missing a corner. When word came over the ice that the upper barn had gone down under the snow, it was the lower brother who took the sack of nails and the wool coat and set out walking.

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The ice sang under him all the way north. He had their mother's last map sewn into the lining of the coat, every field and orchard worked in grey thread as a rosette, with the south orchard picked out in one red stitch where she had been born. He kept his hand on it as he went, the way a man keeps his hand on a purse in a crowd, and he counted the ridges of frozen water until the light went blue and then grey.

His brother was on the roof when he arrived, knocking ice from the rafters with the back of an axe. Neither of them said hello. Pell climbed up without a word and held the nails while the other man hammered, and somewhere between the third board and the fourth, the upper brother reached into his shirt and held out a square of quilt, stiff with frost and folded small. It was the missing corner, stitched with a blue border.

They finished the roof by the second lamp. In spring the ice went out and the straits opened between them again, but the corner was sewn back on where it had always belonged. Pell kept the red stitch in the coat lining, and every winter he takes it out and looks at the place where the thread ran short.