Fine black outline of a state-shaped map with a small red heart inside, tattooed on the side of an ankle.

State outline with red heart on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A thin black outline of a state, resembling Arizona, sits on the side of the ankle and heel, with a small solid red heart placed inside the outline. The linework is clean and even with no shading, and the black line and red fill are the only colours. The tattoo is centred on the ankle and framed against plain skin.

Fine line Ankle State outline Map Heart

Find an artist for this

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 on the draft was still tacky when the clerk carried it up the stairs, and you sat with the boundary sheet flat under a brass weight, a pencilled line running straight as a rule across the bottom of the desert. The thirty-seventh parallel, the Territory office had written, as if a line could be made to mind. You had spent three summers with a chain and a theodolite learning that the land did not care what the office wrote. The river did what rivers do. It bent where it pleased and left you with a jagged western edge that no ruler would ever tidy.

Keep reading

You drew the outline in a hard black nib, and when it dried you sat back and saw that the shape was almost a hand raised in greeting, fingers splayed against the sky. Ruth, who had carried the chain beside you through the scrub, leaned over your shoulder and asked why you had pressed a small red heart into the grey hills near the middle. You told her the red pen had slipped, that you would scrape it off in the morning. You did not scrape it off.

Years later the territory had become a state, and the maps had been reprinted so often that the printers stopped asking what was wrong with them. Ruth kept the original in a drawer. On the week she retired she sent it to you in a brown envelope, the red mark faded to the colour of an old cut, with a note in her narrow hand: Found your mistake. Thought you'd want it back.