Black and white photo of a single-line outline tattoo of the state of New York on the inner forearm of a person whose hand is visible.

New York State outline on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a simple black outline of the state of New York on the inner forearm. The line is a single even stroke with no shading or fill, and the skin around it is pale and unmarked. The forearm fills the left of the frame, with a hand and a light-coloured shirt at the right and a dark background behind.

Forearm Outline Map State outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The map on the bus shelter had been water-stained for so long that the Hudson looked like a bruise, and Marta stood under it with a paper cup going cold and counted the stops on her fingers. Upstate was a long way from the market stalls on Ridley Road, where the rain came sideways off the canal and bounced off the tarpaulins like gravel. She had told her brother she would meet him by the fish van at six. It was ten to.

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Desmond ran the spice stall with his coat zipped to his chin and a pencil behind his ear. He had drawn the outline of the state on the back of a receipt the week before, tracing it from a road atlas he'd found in a charity shop, then pressing so hard the pencil went through. When she asked why he wanted that shape, he only shrugged and said it was the one piece of geography that had never once lied to him about where he came from. She had not understood him then. She thought of it now, watching a man in a yellow cape wrestle a crate of mangoes across the wet cobbles.

The fish van came round the corner at six fifteen, its hazards blinking orange against the grey. Desmond was not in it. Marta found him instead at the far end of the market, sheltering beneath the hoarding of a closed bakery, holding out a folded piece of card with the outline drawn on it in black marker, one clean stroke with a notch at the bottom where the coast turned. He had carried it all day in his inside pocket so it would not get wet. Rain ran off the peak of his cap in a thin silver line. "Lost your bearings?" he said. She laughed, and took the card, and put it in her own pocket beside the bus ticket she had never used.