Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an acoustic guitar on the upper arm, with a crescent moon, stars, a cabin and pine trees inside the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Acoustic guitar with cabin scene on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

An acoustic guitar fills the arm from the headstock to the lower body, with the sound hole replaced by a crescent moon. Inside the lower body sit a cabin with a smoking chimney, a mountain outline and a row of pine trees, with small stars at the upper left and right. The work is built from stippled dotwork shading and bold outlines in black ink on a smooth, evenly lit arm, with no colour.

Dotwork Traditional Upper arm Guitar Cabin Pine tree Crescent moon Star Smoke Mountain Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Corrigan had been carving the same guitar for three winters before the moon agreed to sit in its sound hole. She cut the top from a pine that leaned over the ridge above her father's cabin, the one lightning split the summer he went up the valley and didn't come back. The wood cured in the loft, where the stove smoke could get at it, and every evening she pricked a few more stars into the face with a hot nail until her thumbs ached.

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Joss Hendry came up the track on the first Thursday of the frost with a tin of silver strings and a bottle of sloe gin. He was a tinker who never stopped long enough to be paid properly, and he stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands while she tuned the thing by firelight. She played the old rise-and-fall her father used to hum over the washing. The pines below the house bent their heads toward the sound, and somewhere past the mountain a dog stopped barking to listen.

When Joss asked what she wanted for it, she said nothing, and then she said she wanted the moon to stay where she put it. He laughed and told her the moon went where it liked. She held the guitar up so the lamp shone through the crescent hole, and he saw the black lip of it and went quiet. He wound the new strings on for her without another word, and sat with her until the gin was gone.

In the morning the guitar hung on its nail above the hearth. Mabel went out for water and found the chimney smoke rising straight up in one thin grey line, the way it does only when the air is still enough to hold a tune. It curled over the ridge, past the pines, and dissolved just under the first star.