Colour tattoo on the side ribs showing a Minnesota state outline with a sunset, a common loon, pink lady's slipper orchids, a walleye and a 'You Betcha' banner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Minnesota loon, walleye and orchids on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a Minnesota state outline filled with an orange sunset and pine tree silhouettes, with a common loon with a red eye in front. Pink lady's slipper orchids, a walleye fish and blue waves sit below, and a tan banner reading 'You Betcha' runs along the bottom. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth colour shading in the sky, bird and fish and a clean, layered composition.

Neo-trad Ribs State outline Flower Pine tree Sunset Wave Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lake had not frozen right for three winters, and Old Teodor Vance said it was the walleye's fault for going deep. His daughter Ingrid said it was the loons, who had quit calling. Nobody in Ely believed the loons had quit, but nobody could prove otherwise either, so the arguing went on at the bait shop until the stove was cold.

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In March the ice finally held a man's weight near the north point. Ingrid walked out at dawn with a bucket and a jigging rod, and a common loon surfaced twenty yards off, red-eyed and silent, watching her the way a neighbour watches a stranger in a yard. She sat on the bucket and waited. The loon dived. When it came up it had a walleye crosswise in its bill, flat and gold-flanked, and it swam to the edge of the open water and laid the fish on the ice at her boots as neatly as a cat leaves a bird.

She took the walleye home and told her father. He said that was a story. She said he could come and see the prints in the snow, and the spot where the pines stood black against the sunrise, and he went out with her in his coat and his cap pulled low. The loon was gone by then. Along the shore the lady's slipper orchids had pushed up through the thaw, two of them, pink as old lips.

Teodor picked one and tucked it behind his ear. Then he cleaned the fish, and they ate it with the stove going, and for the first time in three winters he admitted the lake was not his to understand. You betcha, he said, and went to fetch the salt.