Black single-line outline tattoo of the state of North Carolina on the inner wrist, shown against pale skin.

North Carolina state outline on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The subject is a thin black outline of the US state of North Carolina, drawn as a single uniform line. It sits on the inner wrist, with the palm and forearm partly visible around it. The ink is black on light skin, and the plain background is a soft-focus room, so the composition keeps attention on the outline.

Forearm Map State outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tracing table had a scorch mark the shape of Ohio, and Mr Pell swore it was the only thing in the drawing office ever finished properly. Dora kept her teacup well away from it. On Thursdays the room smelled of linseed and wet wool, and the big survey sheet for the Carolina coast lay pinned at four corners, waiting for someone to ink the last of it.

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The stretch that troubled her ran from the western ridges down to the sound. Pell wanted the line heavy where the mountains jagged up and thin where the banks trailed off into nothing, the way a man draws a coast he has never walked. Dora had never walked it either. She had only her brother's letters, pencilled on the backs of tide tables, full of sand moving under the lighthouses and the wind that took the hats off surveyors. 'Draw it true,' he wrote, 'the sea does not care about your pen weight.'

She inked it in one unbroken pass, mountains first, then the hook of the banks, and did not lift the nib until the line closed on itself at the tip. Pell came in with his coat still on, looked at it for a long while, and said it was too even to be believed. Dora said that was the only way she knew how to keep it honest.

That evening she turned the sheet over to dry it, and through the thin paper she could read her brother's handwriting pressed in reverse from some earlier sheet: 'Reached the water. Tell Pell it's further than he thinks.'