Fine line black outline of a state with a small red heart inside it, tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm.

State outline with small heart on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A single fine black outline of a state's borders sits on the inner wrist, with jagged edges along the southern and western sides. A small heart filled with red ink sits in the upper right of the outline. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale skin tone, with the tattoo the clear focus of the frame.

Fine line Forearm State outline Map Heart Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river had moved again, and Dorrie Halvorsen had until Friday to decide whether the county line would follow the water or the old survey stakes rotting in the mud. She pinned the mylar over the lightbox in the back room of the annex, weighted its corners with a stapler, a jar of nibs and her father's brass compass, and began tracing the southern edge, which had always looked to her like a saw blade someone had set down carefully. Every spring the river nibbled a little more of Ohio's border, and every spring a clerk in a grey suit asked why the map could not just be straight.

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Pruitt came in at eleven with a coffee he didn't drink and asked how long the western edge would take. "Rivers don't read memos," she said, not looking up. He sighed the sigh of a man who had never once been on a field survey in February, and left her to it. The 1952 field book was in the bottom drawer, its spine taped twice. Her great-uncle had walked these bends with a chain and a level, and in the margin beside a fork in the creek he had drawn a small heart in pencil and written, underneath, *stop here, Agnes says the fish are better north.*

She found the fork on the new tracing without much trouble. It was in the upper right, where the old lines and the new water had argued for seventy years. Dorrie uncapped the red ink she kept for corrections, hesitated the length of one breath, and drew the heart exactly where he had. By Friday the county line went out with the bends as they were, and a small red mark sat in the corner where no regulation said it should be. Pruitt signed it without comment, which she decided to count as a kindness.