Colour traditional-style tattoo on a calf showing a bearded man's face in a red and black checked hat, with a pipe and a pine-tree landscape.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded man in plaid hat on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bearded man's face wearing a red and black checked hat, with a briar pipe in his mouth, is tattooed on the calf. Bold black outlines and smooth shading define the face and beard, and a small landscape of pine trees and hills sits across the forehead and eye area. Bright reds, greens and skin tones dominate the colour palette.

Neo-trad Calf Man Beard Pipe Pine tree Mountain Landscape Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Hollis Lake camp believed the business about the hills, not until the spring drive of 1911, when Ruddock Keel came down the Sable with the river in flood and the whole crew behind him in a fog so thick you could lose a mule in it. He had no compass. He had a briar pipe clamped in his teeth and a red check hat pulled down to his brows, and he walked us out by the shape of the ridges he kept in his head. He said he'd climbed every one of them as a boy and sketched them on the inside of his skull so he'd never be lost again.

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I cooked for that outfit for eleven seasons, and I'll tell you what I saw that morning. He stopped on a rock, knocked his pipe against his boot heel, and said, "Left at the twin spruce, the one lightning took." We went left. Fourteen men, forty sacks of flour and a team of greys came out of the grey and into the clearing by dinner. Nobody asked how. He wasn't a man for explaining.

The real trouble came later, when the company wanted to flood the valley for a dam. Ruddock sat in the mess tent with his hat on his knee and drew the hills for the surveyor on the back of a flour sack: every bend of the Sable, every pine that would drown. The surveyor laughed until he saw the ink was still wet and the lines didn't match his chart. Ruddock tapped out his pipe and said the river would be where it had always been, if anyone bothered to look. The dam went in further down, and the old hollow stayed dry. I still walk it, and I still take the left at the twin spruce.