Black and grey tattoo of the state of Texas with the word Texas in script, a cross above and shaded roses with leaves, on a person's upper back.

Texas state outline with cross and roses

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a filled outline of the state of Texas with the word Texas in flowing script across its centre, a solid cross above the top edge and two shaded roses with leaves along the lower left and right. The roses and lettering use fine outlines with smooth grey shading, while the state is mostly solid black. The design sits in the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a blue strap visible at the left edge.

Lettering Traditional Back Texas State outline Cross Rose Script Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Brazos ran red that spring, and Mae Tolliver kept her barge, the Lucky Dutch, tied under the pecan trees below the ferry crossing. Nobody on the bank asked why she never sold it. They said the river had taken her husband in April, and that she had paid the mooring fee every month since, in silver dollars, to a man who never once asked for it.

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That autumn a boy came down the bank with a tin cup and asked if she would carry a stone upriver for him. It was limestone, grey and heavy, cut in the shape of the whole state of Texas. A cross was chiselled above its northern edge, and the name was scratched across the middle in a loopy hand. Mae asked why anyone would cut their country on a rock. The boy said his grandmother had done it herself, because she had never trusted a map she could not hold.

They poled upriver three days to the bend where the water turned the colour of cream. The grandmother lay under a slope of wild roses gone leggy with age, their leaves dull and small as coins. Mae set the stone at the head of the grave and the boy pressed his palm flat against the cross, and neither of them said anything for a long while.

By the next spring, a cutting from those roses had rooted itself in the cracked wood of the Lucky Dutch's rail, though Mae had planted nothing there. She kept the mooring fee paid in silver for another year, and then she stopped, because the bank had begun paying her back in shade.