Grey shaded tattoo of a small cabin among pine trees on the outer thigh, with denim shorts visible above it.

Cabin and pine trees on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cabin with a pitched roof and a small window sits among soft-edged pine trees. The linework is loose and sketch-like, with grey shading that fades out at the lower edge of the design. The tattoo is in black and grey on a thigh, with blue denim and a purple fabric in the background.

Thigh Cabin Pine tree Tree Forest Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabin stood where the spruce gave out, on a shelf of granite above Kettle Tarn, and nobody had lived in it since the winter the Hallam boys drove the mule over the pass and never came back for it. My father used to say the roof was the only honest thing about the place: it pitched exactly as far as it needed to shed the snow and not an inch further. I took that as a fact about roofs until I was forty and learned it was a fact about him.

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I drew it first in pencil on the back of a survey form, the way you draw a thing you intend to forget. Then I drew it again in the margin of a ledger, smaller, with the trees bleeding out into the paper so the eye would have to finish them. The window I gave a single square of light, because the ranger's log showed a lamp burning there on the last night anyone signed in, and nobody signed out.

When the rains came off the ridge that October I walked up with a tin of tea and a torch that gave out halfway. The door had swollen shut. I put my shoulder to the frame and it gave with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and inside there was a table, two chairs, and on the table a second survey form, face up, with my own handwriting on it from a season I had forgotten.

I sat in the chair facing the window and watched the spruce darken into one shape. Then I lit the lamp he'd left, and the light fell out across the slope, and far below a car door shut on the road to the village, and I did not go down until the oil ran out.