Solid black tattoo of a Texas-shaped outline filled with swirling scrollwork and dot accents, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scrollwork Texas outline on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A Texas-shaped outline is filled with swirling black scrollwork, curls and small dot accents. The ink is solid black with no visible shading, and the lines look crisp against pale skin. The forearm sits across a black and white damask patterned fabric.

Forearm Texas State outline Scrollwork Swirl Curl Dot

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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

Old Ezra Mott had been asked for a plain state outline, nothing fancy, to hang above the courthouse door in Kerrville. He took the commission, the iron bar and the drawing, and then he could not leave it plain. Every time he bent an edge straight, a curl rose up under the hammer, as if the grain of the metal wanted to turn back on itself.

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By the third week the panel was black with scrolls. He punched dots along the Panhandle where the sparks had jumped, and he let the Gulf coast frill out like a petticoat. The sheriff came by with his thumbs in his belt, looked up at it and said the state seemed to have been dreaming about lace. Ezra said the land was never as flat as the map let on. The sheriff laughed and went off to his dinner.

That night a dust storm came up out of the west. The courthouse bell started ringing, though nobody was pulling the rope, and a boy swore the clapper was keeping time with the wind. Ezra took a lantern out and found the iron panel humming on its hooks, each scroll giving back a different low note, and he knew then which rivers the curls had been meant for, the Brazos and the Pecos and the long dry runs between them.

They still hang it there. The map in the post office is a plain line now, but if you stand under the panel at dusk and hold your palm up, you can feel the curls breathing out the last of the day's heat.