Fine line black outline of the state of Minnesota on the outer forearm, shown in a close photo of bare skin.

Minnesota state outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single thin black outline of the US state of Minnesota sits on the forearm, with its northern arrowhead pointing to the right. The linework is even and unshaded, with no fill or added detail inside the shape. The skin is a warm pale tone with a soft, vintage-style colour cast, and the tattoo is the only mark in the frame apart from a small spot on the skin.

Fine line Forearm State outline Map Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the ferry has been cancelled again, so I am writing this at the kitchen table on the back of the tide chart, with the stove ticking and your father's boots steaming by the door. Mrs Okerlund came across the ice road this morning with a pie she said was for us and then ate half of it on our step, so you can tell Aunt Lil the island is still standing and still full of gossip.

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You asked in your last letter whether the state map is still on the kitchen wall. It is, though the corners have gone soft from handling. I used to trace it with a finger through the long winters, starting down at the Iowa line where the farms give out, up past all those lakes that look like someone spilt them, and round to the arrowhead where the shore turns hard and the water goes on past the horizon like a sea. Your grandfather pointed north with his whole arm, the way the state does, as if he were sending the boat back out.

The thing I did not put in the last letter is the surveyor who came over on Tuesday. He had a plotter under one arm and a sunburn on the back of his neck, and he wanted to know why our island was not drawn on the county sheet at all. I told him it was too small to bother with. He said the boundary had been redrawn in the eighteen nineties, the line had slipped a quarter mile across the water, and for the paperwork the island belonged to nobody until someone signed for it. I laughed at him. Then I walked down to the landing and stood there a long time, realising I had spent sixty years knowing exactly which side of the line I was on and had never once gone looking for it.

So come home and bring the good pencil. We will row out past the reeds in the grey light, and if the lake decides the island is not ours, we will simply keep rowing until it does. Your loving mother, Ingrid.