Colour tattoo of the state of Alaska filled with snowy mountains, pine trees and a lake, with a red sky above, on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alaska state outline with mountains and forest

Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of the state of Alaska filled with a scene of snow-capped mountains, a dark band of pine trees and a reflective lake. A red and orange sky sits along the top edge of the design. The lines are bold and the shading is soft and layered, with blues and purples dominating the landscape.

Back Map Mountain Pine tree Forest Lake Sky Sunset

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign at Eagle Col had been shot through twice, and Nell Varga read the bullet holes like a second set of directions while her brother hauled the chains out of the cab. Ruben said the pass would be clear by dusk. Ruben said a lot of things on the road north, most of them about the sunset, which he claimed the state had been designed around.

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They walked up the shoulder with the lake below them, a long sheet of dark water that had not yet decided whether to freeze. Nell had a map her grandfather drew in 1961, the whole of Alaska traced in biro on the back of a feed-store calendar, and he had filled the outline with the things he meant to show her: peaks, a row of spruce, a lake shaded in blue pencil. She had always thought it was a child's picture. From up here it looked like a survey.

Halfway to the ridge the cloud tore open and the peaks went rose, then a hot orange that ran along the top of the sky like a seam. Ruben stopped so suddenly she walked into his back. 'There,' he said, and for once he was not talking about the sunset. Grandpa had drawn the sky in red pen across the top of the page, the only colour he had used with any hurry.

She took the calendar out, unfolded it against the wind, and held it up to the light. The blue lake on the paper matched the blue lake below, the spruce matched the spruce, and the pass where they stood was a small hard dot she had never noticed before, right where his pen had pressed through the paper. Ruben looked over her shoulder. 'He got it wrong,' he said. 'The mountains are bigger.' Nell folded the map into her pocket and started down toward the truck, where the chains were waiting.