Black and white photo of a fine line outline tattoo of the state of Texas on the back of a person's neck, with hair falling over the head.

Texas outline on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of the state of Texas sits centrally on the back of the neck, with the head and upper hair cropped out of frame. The single thin black line is clean and even, with no interior shading or fill. The image is monochrome, and a fine chain necklace is visible just below the tattoo against a dark jumper.

Fine line Neck Texas State outline Map Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's boy had the map buttoned inside his coat when the snow came down over Coldwater Gap, and he did not unroll it until the mule lay down under him and would not get up. By the light of a single match he saw that the paper had gone soft as bread at the folds, but the outline still held: one clean line, the panhandle pointing north like a finger, the long jaw of the Rio Grande making the southern edge. Old Mr Teague had drawn it in a single morning, he said, with a pen he never let anyone else touch.

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"A line is only true if you can walk it," Teague had told him in the spring, rapping the table with his knuckles. "Anybody can draw a state. Walk the whole edge and then tell me." The boy had laughed. Then he had gone, and for three months he had walked the dry washes and cattle tracks, sleeping in ditches, counting miles on a string knotted every ten. He had come to believe the outline was a kind of promise, that wherever he stood he could say which way was the edge.

The match went out. In the dark he traced the shape with his thumb, pressing hard where the line crossed the flat and softly on the bends near the bottom. He counted the bends from the gap down to the grass. Eleven. He left the mule where it lay, and he kept his hand on the paper.

In the morning the snow had thinned to a grey haze. He came down the western shoulder with the map open against his chest, following the long straight northern edge until it met a fence, then a windmill, then a dog barking somewhere below. Teague stood at the cabin door with the pen behind his ear. "Well?" he said. The boy laid the wet paper on the table and put his finger on the pass. "I walked it," he said, and Teague only nodded, as if it had been drawn that way all along.