Black and grey tattoos across the back, upper arm and calf of a woman in a bikini on a sandy beach, seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Back, arm and calf tattoos on a beach

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind on a sandy beach wears a dark bikini, showing several tattoos. Her back has a large dark winged design with a cross-like ornament lower down, and her upper left arm carries a dark sleeve-style piece. Her left calf is wrapped in a bold black lattice band that runs down toward the ankle, and the work is all black ink and grey shading against natural greenery.

Back Upper arm Calf Wing Cross Lattice Ornament Sleeve Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Wait until the wind drops before you start down, the carter tells you at the hut, and you laugh, because you have never once waited for anything. By dawn the pass is a white throat between two grey shoulders, and the only marks on it are the black lattice of snow fencing the village men nailed up last autumn and the iron cross at the bend where a Hollander's mule went over in 1911.

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You take the letter because the old woman's hand shook when she gave it to you. It is addressed to a brother in the valley below, and it smells of woodsmoke and camphor. The wings on the chapel gate at the top of the village were carved by the same brother, you remember, a pair of eagles who never quite agreed on which way to face. You tuck the letter inside your coat and start.

Halfway across, the drift gives under you. You go down to the hip, then the waist, and the fencing creaks above you like a ship's rigging. You claw along the lattice, each diagonal a rung, each cross-brace a handhold someone else fixed in the cold. Your fingers stop feeling anything. The cross at the bend comes out of the cloud, black against white, and you see that the mule's owner hung a tin lantern on it years ago. It is still there, still waiting for someone to light it.

You reach the valley at dusk with the letter dry and your hands in your armpits. The brother reads it standing in the doorway, then turns it over and reads the back, where the old woman has written one more line: the lantern is yours now, go and light it.