Traditional style colour tattoo on a calf of an oval mountain lake scene with a campfire, tent and pine trees, with the words Adventure Awaits arcing above.

Campfire and mountain lake scene on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

An oval vignette shows a grey mountain peak above a blue lake, with green pine trees on the slopes, a green tent on the grassy bank and an axe in a tree stump. A flaming campfire sits in the lower left, and the words ADVENTURE AWAITS curve along the top edge in bold black lettering. Thick black outlines define the shapes, with solid colour fills in blue, green, yellow and orange and shaded grey rock.

Traditional Calf Mountain Lake Campfire Tent Pine tree Axe Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that stool nearer the grate, the pair of you, and mind the cat, she's been waiting all day for a warm patch. Right. The summer our Ned turned seventeen, he took a pallet board off the stack by the milking shed and painted two words across it in black, ADVENTURE AWAITS, and nailed it above the barn door where Father would have to walk under it every morning. Father read it, said nothing, and went out to the top field with his hands in his pockets.

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That September the pair of us walked up to Greywater Tarn with a tent that smelled of old paraffin and a loaf wrapped in newspaper. Grey rock stood over the water like a sleeping ox, and the pines on the slope were so dark green they looked wet. We pitched on the grass by the bank, and Ned drove the hatchet into a dead stump for handy kindling, then built the fire so high the sparks went over our heads and into the spruce. I said we'd have the whole hillside alight. He said the hillside had been waiting for something to happen.

In the morning Ned stripped to his trousers and went straight into the tarn to prove he could reach the far shore before the cold got into his chest. I stood on the bank with the kettle and watched his white back grow smaller, and I counted to a hundred twice before I shouted. He came back blue at the lips, laughing so hard he could barely stand, and sat by the embers holding his hands out to them as if they owed him money.

Father came up the track the next afternoon with the cart, looked at the tent, the stump and the black ring of stones, and said only, 'Well. It awaited.' Then he worked the axe out of the stump, wiped the blade on his coat and laid it in the cart for the trip home. Ned's board is still over the barn door. Nobody has ever painted over it, and in January the whole yard reads it first thing when they go out to feed the beasts.