Colour tattoo of the Ohio state outline filled with the state flag, with the script words Home is Where the Heart is below, on the upper leg.

Ohio flag state outline on thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of the state of Ohio filled with its state flag, with a blue field, white stars, and a white ring around a red disc. Below it, the words Home is Where the Heart is are written in black script lettering. The flag has soft shading and folds that suggest movement, and the photograph is taken straight on against an indoor background.

Lettering Thigh State outline Flag Star Script text Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red disc went on first, because Ruth always began with the circle. She laid it in at the size of a dinner plate, then the white ring with a rigger brush so steady her father had called it cheating. The thirteen stars came after, spaced with a length of string pinned at both ends, and by the time the sun cleared the silo she had the whole blue field down. She sat on an upturned crate with the tin hooked over her thumb and waited for the paint to set before she drew the state around it.

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Nobody in Cutler's Ford had asked for a flag on the feed store. Mr Hobday wanted a sign that said FEED, and Ruth had gone home and drawn the whole of Ohio on the back of an envelope instead, the bent top corner, the lake edge like a jaw. She told him the lettering would cost less if the state did the framing. He laughed, paid her in cash and gave her two jars of damson jam for the trouble.

Her brother Tom had gone west for the railroads and sent one postcard in four years. It came from Nevada with only five words in his square capitals: IS THE OLD FLAG UP. So she finished the wall that week and painted the line beneath in her best hand, the script their mother had copied from the front of the family Bible. Home is where the heart is.

In April a dusty pickup pulled into the yard. A man got out and stood in front of the wall a long while, his hat in his hands. Then he came inside and said she had got the lake wrong. Ruth told him it was exactly right, and Tom laughed the way he had at nine years old, and paid for the feed.