Black ink sketch of bare trees and a lake framed in a circle on textured white paper, drawn in fine line with fineliner pens beside it.

Bare trees and lake in a circle

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A circular vignette shows bare, leafless trees on the left and right, a cluster of conifers across the middle, and a lake or river in the foreground. The linework is fine and dense, with hatching used for the water and tree bark, and the shading is achieved through ink density rather than tone. The drawing is in black ink on off-white paper, with two fineliner pens resting in the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Tree Forest Lake Water Conifer Landscape Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lake was the last thing Mara painted before the fair moved on, because her grandmother said a showman never leaves a lake unfinished. She worked on it at night in the caravan, on a round board no bigger than a dinner plate, with a fine nib and a pot of Indian ink that smelled faintly of pears.

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Every town the fair reached wanted a different ending. At Holm the children asked for conifers, dark and tall, so they could hide their ball in them. At Wyke an old man stood at the rail for an hour and said nothing, then asked her to put the bare birches back on the left, the ones the railway men had cut down the spring before. She did it. He paid in sixpences and walked off into the rain without looking back.

The last town was Thornley, where the lake was real and the fair was set up on its banks. Mara stood the board on the shingle and looked from one to the other until the two began to agree. The trees on the right leaned the way the wind leaned. The water had the same grey hatching as the reeds. Nobody needed telling that the picture was finished. She shut the lid of her pen box and went to find her supper.