Colour tattoo on the side ribs of a West Virginia state outline containing an arched bridge, green hills and a river, with script lettering beside it.

West Virginia state outline with bridge on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of West Virginia filled with a painted scene of an arched steel bridge over a river, with green wooded hills and pink and blue clouds behind it. Script lettering runs alongside the outline in black ink. The shading is soft and blended in the sky and water, and the design sits diagonally across the side of the torso.

Lettering Ribs State outline Bridge River Hill Cloud Script Lyric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the state line at twenty to six with the radio dissolving into hiss and the atlas open across the passenger seat, its folds gone soft as cloth. Ahead the steel arch lifts out of the gorge like a held breath. Below, the river runs the colour of weak tea, and the hills on either side have turned the green they only go in the last week of May, when everything seems to be growing faster than it can manage.

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Your uncle Ray is leaning on the railing where the lay-by gravel gives out. He has a thermos, two enamel cups and a dispute he has carried since Christmas about whether the bridge was painted or galvanised. "Galvanised," he says, before you have shut the car door. "Painted is for people who like being argued with." You take the cup he offers. It tastes of coffee boiled twice and something sweeter underneath, probably the condensed milk he denies adding.

You walk out to the centre span together, the way you used to when you were small enough to be lifted over the rail to see the water. Ray points out the spot where a kayak went under last summer and the spot where the old ferryman's shack stood before the flood took it. He does not say why he drove up from Beckley on a Tuesday. You do not ask. Lorries hum past behind you, and the wind off the gorge tugs at your collar as though it wants you to turn around.

The sky over the far ridge has gone the colour of a peach stone, and the clouds are catching it on their undersides. Ray folds the map along its old creases and hands it to you. Look at it properly, he says. Every road on there ends up back here, if you're patient enough. You fold it again, badly, and push it into your coat pocket, where it sits against your hip all the way home.