Colour tattoo of the state of Oklahoma on an upper arm, filled with a blue sky, red and yellow flowers, a small pink heart and a bird perched on the edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oklahoma state outline with flowers and a bird

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of the state of Oklahoma, with its panhandle extending to the left. Inside the outline are a blue sky with white clouds, a small pink heart, and two large red and yellow flowers, with a small bird perched on the top edge. The shading is soft and the colours are bright, and the design fills most of the frame against the skin.

Botanical Realism Upper arm State outline Flower Heart Sky Cloud Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad drew the state on the back of a feed sack the summer the rain quit. He was a surveyor for the county, which meant he spent his days with a chain and a tripod and his evenings trying to get Oklahoma right with a carpenter's pencil. The panhandle always gave him trouble. It stuck out like an elbow, he said, and nobody ever asked the state how it felt about that.

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Mum said he could have the sack for the chicken run if he let me colour it in. So we sat at the kitchen table with a tin of crayons and the radio on low, and I put a blue sky over the top, then white clouds, then a pink heart, because Mum said every map needs somewhere to keep the love. Out past the gate, the blanket flowers had come up in the ditch, orange and red, so thick the cows wouldn't walk through them. I put two of those in too, big as dinner plates, and a grey bird on the tip of the panhandle, because a mockingbird had been yelling from the fence post all afternoon as if it owned the whole place.

Dad came back from the section line at dusk with his boots full of red dirt and looked at the sack for a long time. He didn't say it was good. He pinned it above the stove, under the calendar, and for once the shape of the state looked like it had somewhere to go.

The sack went soft and brown with grease over the years, but the flowers came back to the ditch every August, and the bird still sat on the elbow, as if someone had told it exactly where the edge was.