Colour rib tattoo of the West Virginia outline filled with an arched bridge over green hills and a river, with script lettering reading take me home country roads.

West Virginia outline with bridge and script

Lettering · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A tattoo on the side of a torso shows the outline of the state of West Virginia filled with a steel arch bridge over wooded green hills and a winding blue river beneath a pink and blue cloudy sky. Script lettering in black wraps around the state, reading take me home country roads. The linework is dark and clean, with the scenery shaded in soft greens, blues and pinks, and the composition runs vertically along the ribs.

Lettering Ribs State outline Bridge Hill River Cloud Script Lyric

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan, the wind up here comes straight off the gorge and tries to take your hat before you have the rivet gun steady. Forty metres down, the New River runs the colour of strong tea over its stones, and on a clear morning you can see the hills folding one behind another all the way to the Ohio line, blue at the edges like a bruise going off. Gerald says you never look down. You look at the far pier and count your breaths against the bolts.

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We are at the crown now. The two halves of the arch have crept out from either side over four months, reaching like men across a kitchen table who have fallen out and still want the salt passed. Today the last section lifts on the crane and the whole crew goes quiet on the radio. Gerald hummed the hymn you used to sing over the sink, and I found myself singing the words in the wrong order, which is how you taught me to sing everything.

The closing pin goes in at four. If it sits true, the arch carries itself and needs nothing underneath but air. I keep thinking of you saying the whole valley is held up by people who never see each other's faces, and I think you were right, though I'd rather tell you properly when I'm home.

Friday's bus gets me to Beckley by six. Leave the porch light on, and leave the radio on the windowsill tuned to whatever station fades in and out over the hills. I'll know the way by the sound of it.