Black and grey traditional tattoo on a forearm showing a log cabin among pine trees, a mountain, a moon and clouds, with a scroll banner of lettering beside it.

Cabin, pines and mountain on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a log cabin at the base of the design, set among tall pine trees with a mountain peak rising behind them. A crescent moon and small clouds sit in the sky, and a scroll banner with lettering curves along the left side. The linework is bold with solid black areas and grey shading on the trees, mountain and cabin walls, and the design is framed in a tall vertical composition.

Traditional Forearm Cabin Mountain Pine tree Moon Cloud Banner Lettering Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one left who remembers the way up to the Hollin Reach, so the queen's messenger finds you at the bottom of the valley, mending a fence with wire that has rusted through in three places. He says the mountain has moved in the night. He says the pines have started walking, slowly, toward the cabin with the bent chimney that nobody has lived in since the flood.

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You go anyway, because the cabin is yours. Your grandmother built it from larch she felled with a borrowed axe, and the banner above its door still carries her words, though the paint has flaked to grey. By the time you reach the tree line the moon is out, a thin white crescent hung over the peak like a hook, and the clouds around it look close enough to climb. The pines stand in their ranks with their shadows pooled at their roots. You count them the way she taught you, one, two, three, and by the nineteenth you understand the messenger was right.

Inside the cabin the stove is cold but the kettle is full. On the table lies a folded map of a kingdom that existed only in her stories, with a single road drawn in ink that runs from the door to the mountain and back again. You trace it with a finger. The road is not where you remember it. Someone has redrawn it, and in the margin, in a hand you recognise as your own, is written: go home by the moon.

You put the kettle on. Outside, the pines stop walking.