Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a log cabin beside a river and campfire, mountains and trees under a sunset, a red flower below, and the words THIS MUST BE THE PLACE.

Cabin, mountains and lettering on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a log cabin with a shingled roof beside a winding river, a campfire, pine trees and snow-capped mountains under a red and orange sunset. Below the scene sits a red and orange flower, with leaves at the base, and the words THIS MUST BE THE PLACE curve around the top and bottom of a rope-style border. The bold black outlines, flat fills and limited palette of reds, oranges, greens and greys are typical of traditional American tattooing, and the arm is photographed against a plain black sleeve.

Traditional Upper arm Cabin Mountain Campfire River Tree Sunset Cloud Flower Leaves Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been circling the same three streets of Leeds since midnight, the wipers sweeping a drizzle that never quite commits to rain, when the woman in the wet green coat flags you down outside the closed chemist. She doesn't get in so much as fold herself into the back seat, a rucksack on her knees and a paper map of the Lake District, its creases gone soft as cloth.

Keep reading

"Keswick," she says. "Or wherever the road stops being a road."

You tell her it's three hours, and that the last bus left long ago, and she laughs as though you've told her a good joke. Her brother has a cabin above a river, she says, one lamp and a stove that smokes if you don't feed it. He has rung her every Sunday for a year to say come up, the fire's lit. She has finally decided to believe him.

Past the ring road the city thins into sodium lamps and then into dark fields, and she talks about the mountains without seeming to notice she is doing it. Snow on the tops even in April. The sun going down red behind the peaks, so the whole sky looks on fire and nobody minds. At the turn for the A591 she leans forward and asks you to stop, just for a moment, and you do.

She climbs out and stands in the verge with her face tipped up, the rucksack hanging from one hand. You wait with the engine running. Then she taps twice on the roof, the way you'd tap a lamp to wake it, and calls back through the window that this is it, this must be the place. You watch her walk towards a dark line of pines, and you don't pull away until a small orange light flickers up on the hill.