Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ohio State logo with buckeye leaves on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The design centres on a red block O with the words OHIO STATE in white lettering with grey shading. Black tribal swirls surround the emblem, and green buckeye leaves with brown nuts sit at the lower half. The solid black linework and colour fills are crisp, and the tattoo fills most of the frame on the upper arm.

Upper arm Logo Leaf Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the col before the snow does, though the carter swore you would not. The track up from Harrow Bend is steep and loose, and by the second hairpin your calves are shaking under the pack. A boy at the last hut pressed a brown nut into your palm and told you to keep it in your fist when the wind comes off the ridge. You have it now, smooth and cool, one side scored where the shell cracked long ago.

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At the top a stone post stands with a red square painted on it, a block letter O with a dull bar through its middle, the paint flaking to rust. Someone has bound green leaves around it with wire, five-fingered things that should have withered in the cold but have not. You had expected the pass to be empty. Instead a woman sits on a pack beside the post, eating bread. She looks up and says the wind will turn by dusk, and that you should shelter in the lee of the stone.

You stop. You share the bread. She tells you the O is for the valley town that once kept this road open, back when people had money to mend it, and the nuts are for the tree that grew below the town square, which fed the mules when the grain failed. Her grandmother planted it. You do not ask why the tree is gone. You watch the clouds pile over the far ridge and the sun slide behind them.

When the wind drops you start down, the nut still in your fist. Halfway to the first hut you open your hand and find it has gone warm. You put it in your pocket, and behind you the leaves on the post are still green in the last of the light.