Fine line black outline of a state on the ankle with the word home in script and a small red heart, in fine line style.

State outline with 'home' and red heart on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of an ankle and foot showing a thin black line outline of a state shape with the word home written in cursive script inside it. A small solid red heart sits above the word home, and the rest of the design is unshaded line work. The ink is crisp and even on smooth skin, with the soft background blurred behind the leg.

Fine line Ankle State outline Map Home Script Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite drew the outline in one pass, the way her father had taught her, pen never lifting until the border came back round to where it started. The print shop wanted the state for the back of a school atlas and wanted it by Friday. She followed the northern edge down past the river bends, murmuring the county names under her breath as if they might object to being left out.

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The man on the phone had asked for only one thing: a word tucked inside the shape where a town would sit. Not a name, he said. Home. She practised it on the back of an envelope in her own looping hand, because the printer's typeface looked like a bank's, and the h kept leaning like a fence post in a gale. Then she dabbed a red heart above it, no bigger than a grain of rice. He had said his mother would know where it belonged without being told.

On Friday she carried the proofs to the shop herself. The clerk held the sheet up to the window and frowned at the red mark. "Which town is that?" Marguerite opened her mouth and found she could not answer. The heart had come out of her pen without asking leave, the way things do when you have been away from a place long enough to stop trying to name it.

On the drive back she took the old road along the river, the one that ran almost exactly where her line had run. At the bridge, where the state gave up and the water began, she pulled onto the verge and sat with both hands on the wheel, the way you sit when you have arrived somewhere and have not yet decided what to call it.