Black and grey tattoo of a state outline with a city skyline silhouette and lettering inside it, on the side of the ribs.

State outline with skyline and lettering on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo sits on the side of the ribs, showing an outline of a state shape with a city skyline silhouette along its lower edge. Several lines of lettering fill the outline, appearing mirrored in the photo. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black fill for the skyline and a greyscale photograph framing the torso against a wooden door.

Lettering Ribs State outline Map City skyline Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice went out on Lake Vermilion three weeks ago, and I stood on the dock with your father's old thermos and waited for something to tell me it was over. Nothing did. The loons came back, the same pair as always, and Mrs Haugen's boy went out in his uncle's boat without a life jacket, which I am not going to discuss in a letter.

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You wrote that the towers downtown are lit so bright at night you can't see a single star from your window. I believe you. I drove down once, the year you got your first job, and I remember how the skyline came up out of the flat fields like a row of broken teeth. I sat in the car park of that hotel with the engine running and thought, well, that's where my boy is now.

I'm not writing to ask you to come home. Your cousin Dale says I should, and I've told him to mind his own business. I'm writing because I found the old road atlas in the hall cupboard, the one with the state cut out at the back, and I've pinned the map above the sink. Your grandmother used to say a person should come home when they've seen enough, not before and not after. She stitched it on a tea towel in 1961, and it still hangs on the oven door, backwards, because she never did learn to read her own embroidery in a mirror.

Anyway. Eat something green. The walleye in the freezer is for Easter, so don't come asking. Love, Mum.