Single-line black outline tattoo of the state of Michigan on the top of a bare foot, with dark nail polish on the toes.

Michigan state outline on top of foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of the state of Michigan, including the upper peninsula, sits on the top of a bare foot. The linework is even and unshaded, with no fill, and the ink is set against warm skin on a textured carpet. The composition is close and angled, with the toes in the lower right of the frame.

Fine line Other State outline Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Okonedo-Lind had been sent to the Straits with a theodolite, a flask of cold tea and a tooth that wouldn't stop aching, to fix the waterline before the ice came back. The old maps were paper, brittle as pastry, and the coastline printed on them no longer matched anything she could walk. The lake had risen and fallen so many times that the place her grandmother called home had been redrawn by water far more than by people.

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Her supervisor, a man called Desmond Vaux who wore a coat stitched from fishing nets, handed her a sheet printed on something that was not quite paper. "Trace it," he said. "Only the shape. Don't correct it." She laid the sheet over the shoreline at the narrows and saw that the line the water had kept was the same one: the lower shape like a mitten, and the northern arm reaching across the straits as if to hold something back.

She spent three days at the narrows. Each dusk she walked the north shore and measured where the lake had taken the last village, and each dusk the old outline sat a little truer on the ground. Vaux said the state had been a sort of promise, something people drew when they wanted to say where they belonged, and that the lake had kept the drawing because nobody else would.

On the last morning she pinned the tracing to the post at the water's edge, weighted it with a flat stone, and wrote in pencil along the margin: surveyed, unchanged. The wind lifted one corner and let it fall. Out on the grey water the outline held, thin and dark as ink, and she packed her instruments and went home without correcting a single line.