Fine line black outline of an elongated US state-shaped map across the top of a foot, with a small reddish spot near its right edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Thin line state outline on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line black outline of an elongated, map-like shape, resembling a US state, runs across the top of a bare foot. The linework is thin and even, with a slightly irregular edge along the right side. The ink is black on pale skin, with a small reddish spot near the outline and a stone surface visible beneath the foot.

Fine line Other Map State outline Outline Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had gone into the water trough again, so I was beating at it with the back of a spade when Uncle Desmond came out of the barn with the old atlas under one arm. He had lost its cover years ago. He laid it open on the bale stack and ran a thumb down a page of faded greens until he found the shape he was after, long and flat along the top, ragged down the right side like a torn ticket.

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"Look at that," he said, as if I had argued. "Nine hundred miles of it, and nobody ever drew it straight."

I told him the sheep wouldn't wait for geography, and he laughed the way he does when he has already won. He left at seventeen on a Greyhound with a cardboard case and a cousin's address in Ohio biro'd across his wrist, and he has never gone back, though he speaks of the place the way you'd speak of a coat you left on a train.

Then he put his fingertip on a spot near the ragged edge. "Kitchen with blue tiles. My mother's. Nobody's printed a map that shows a kitchen, so I marked it myself." He pulled the red pen from his shirt pocket, the one he uses for ear tags, and pressed a dot so small it nearly vanished into the paper.

I didn't ask him whether the tiles were still there. You don't ask a man like that about tiles. I took the pen, turned the calendar on the nail by the door to a month with nothing written in it, and drew the shape from memory, badly, the top too straight and the edge too kind. Then I put the dot where he had put his, and the trough began to freeze over again behind us.