Black line drawing of the state of Washington with a small red heart inside and the word home in black script along the bottom edge.

Washington state outline with heart and home

Mixed · Flash

A black continuous-line outline of the state of Washington on a pale grey background, with the coastline, Puget Sound inlet and eastern border clearly traced. A small red heart sits in the central area of the state, and the word home is written in black cursive script along the southern edge. The linework is even and of medium weight, with the red heart as the only colour accent.

State outline Heart Home Script Map

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Master Ilse Varnholt had drawn the kingdom of Corvane forty-one times, and the Chancellor still sent the sheet back. The northern border was too straight, he said. A king's realm should not look as though a clerk had measured it with a ruler while cursing the sea. Varnholt carried the sheet home under his arm through the rain, past the fish market where gulls squabbled over the last of the herring, and laid it on his kitchen table beside the lamp.

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The trouble was the eastern edge. On the old charts it ran where the river Sallow had flooded three villages in his grandfather's time, and no surveyor had ever agreed where the water stopped. Varnholt had walked that ground as a boy, barefoot, carrying his mother's letters to a cousin who kept goats above the reeds. The cousin, Pell, had gone south to the coast last autumn when the goats died. The letters had stopped, and the reeds had grown over the path.

He worked through the night. The coast he drew with care, every inlet with its hooked finger of land. Along the southern shore, where the sea ran roughest, he wrote a single word in the slanting hand his mother had taught him, letters that leaned into the wind like people walking home. Then, with the finest pen he owned, he set a small red heart in the middle of the realm, over the grazing where the goats had been, where no official surveyor would ever think to look.

At dawn the Chancellor's clerk unrolled the sheet and frowned. "This is not a survey. There is nothing here but a heart." Varnholt wiped his pen on a rag and did not look up. "It is the only true thing on the sheet." The clerk, who had never walked the reeds, stamped it approved and let it go.