Fine line tattoo of an Oregon state outline with the word home in script, a small pink heart and a green pine tree, on the side ribs.

Oregon state outline with home and pine tree

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a black outline of the state of Oregon with the word home written in cursive beneath it. Inside the outline sit a small filled pink heart and a green pine tree, with the tree drawn in simple solid colour. The thin, even linework and the minimal colour accents give the piece a delicate composition on the side of the torso.

Fine line Ribs State outline Map Home Heart Pine tree Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had gone thick in the jar again, so Ada Quill stood the pen in a saucer of warm water and kept talking to the empty room as if Teodor were still at the next desk. "Forty years I've drawn coastlines for other people's atlases," she said. "Not one of them ever asked me for the edge of a place someone had left."

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The letter came on a Tuesday in March, folded around a sketch on tracing paper. Someone called Marit had written in careful capitals: the state outline, the way it goes square along the eastern side where the mountains stand up, and beneath it, the word home in joined-up hand. She wanted it exact. No rivers, no county lines. Just the border and the one thing she could not stop thinking about, which was the tree.

Ada drew it three times. The first attempt set the pine too far west, where the rain sits heavy, and the second made the heart so large it crowded the margin. On the third she chose a spot a little north of the middle, where the land climbs toward the high desert and a person might wait at a bus stop and count the cold. She pricked the outline with a needle, dusted it with charcoal, and pressed it onto a clean sheet. The lines came up even as stitching.

When the finished stencil went back in the post, Ada kept the offcut. That evening she laid it over the window glass, where the streetlamp came through, and traced the square edge of the state with one cold finger. Then she took her own atlas down from the shelf, opened it to the page with the Pacific, and drew a small heart in the corner, where nobody would ask her why.