Fine black outline tattoo of the state of Michigan with a small red heart on the lower peninsula, sitting on the ankle and foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Michigan outline with red heart on the foot

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A thin black outline of the US state of Michigan, showing both peninsulas, is inked on the skin with a small solid red heart placed on the western side of the lower peninsula. The linework is even and uninterrupted, with shading absent and the fill limited to the single red heart. The tattoo sits near the ankle on a light-skinned foot, shown from a close angle against a plain background.

Fine line Ankle State outline Map Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart in the wheelhouse still has a pencil dot on the western shore of the lower peninsula, pressed hard enough to dent the paper. I put it there the spring I turned nineteen, when a map seemed like a sensible thing to trust with a person. Hollis Brand, who skippered the Marian Rose and never said a sentence he didn't have to, let me keep it on the wall beside the tide tables.

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We pushed sand and gravel between Manistee and the Gary docks, forty hours on and six off, the barge groaning behind us like a cow in a stall. In January the lake froze at the edges and the tow lines iced into stiff black rope. Nobody talked much about home on that deck, because home was a thing you could lose sight of if you stared at it too long from a steel rail in a gale.

Mags wrote to me care of the harbourmaster, which is how people wrote in those days. Her letters were short. The kettle still whistled. The gulls had got into the bins again. Come back when the ice goes, she wrote, and I read that line so often the paper softened in my pocket.

The ice went in the second week of April. We tied up at the Manistee wall and I walked the front street with my kitbag over one shoulder, past the bait shop and the lighthouse with its cracked white paint. Mags was already at the door with a tea towel over her arm, looking at my boots before she looked at my face. Back in the wheelhouse the pencil dot is still there, but Hollis has drawn a small red heart beside it in grease pencil, badly, and says it's so the pilots know where to turn for home.