Colour tattoo of the state of Wisconsin filled with fingerprint swirls shaded from purple to orange, with a small outlined heart near the eastern edge, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wisconsin state outline filled with fingerprint swirls

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black outlined map of the state of Wisconsin is filled with fine, concentric fingerprint-like lines. The fill is washed with a gradient that moves from purple and pink at the top to orange at the bottom, and a small open heart sits near the eastern peninsula. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Fine line Other Fingerprint Heart Swirl Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Kowalczyk had been asked by the county surveyor to draw the whole state from fingerprints, which was not a thing anybody had asked a clerk to do before. He wanted the lakes left white. She rolled the thumbs of every member of the Ashland grange, the Door County fishermen, a night nurse from Green Bay and the Sheboygan postmaster's twin boys into violet ink from her mother's dye jars, and she pressed each one onto the card with her whole weight.

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The trouble came from the thumb. The Door peninsula would not sit flat. Its ridges ran the wrong way, curling out toward Lake Michigan like a ferry leaving harbour, and no amount of tracing would make them behave. Ruth sat with the card three evenings running. On the fourth, Abe Lindqvist, who had hauled perch out of the bay for forty years, came in with his own print still greasy from net twine and laughed at her. "You want the lake in there, you have to put the wind in it."

So she did. She washed the sheet in a sunset, violet where the north woods went dark and orange where the fields ran down to the water. Abe's wife told her where the lighthouse beam fell on the bay at dusk, and Ruth left that one curl of the thumb unfilled, a small white gap that no clerk had any business guessing at. With the point of a steel pin she pricked a heart into the margin of the gap, open at the top, so the light could get in.

The county kept the sheet in a flat drawer for thirty years. When the drawer was finally emptied for the move to the new building, the only thing anybody wanted from it was that little heart, cut out with the good scissors and carried home in a wallet, though nobody could say any longer whose heart it had been meant to be.