Traditional colour tattoo of a red A-frame tent with pine trees, a moon and a green lantern, placed on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Camping tent with lantern and pine trees on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A red A-frame tent sits in the centre of the design, with its flap showing the number 2014 in dark lettering. Inside the tent opening, dark green pine trees stand against a purple night sky with a crescent moon, above an orange glowing ground and a green lantern. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour give it a classic look, and the tent is framed on a limb in a close, centred composition.

Traditional Calf Tent Camping Pine tree Lantern Moon Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The zip gave up somewhere past the second pine, so Dad knotted the flap shut with baler twine and declared the tent weatherproof by faith alone. Mum had bought it in 2014 from a shop in Penrith that smelled of paraffin and wet rope, and she'd written the year across the flap in marker so we would never mix it up with the old one in the loft. We were pitched on the edge of Kielder, two miles from anything with a kettle.

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By nine the light had gone the colour of weak tea. Dad hung the paraffin lantern from the ridge pole, and the canvas glowed orange like the inside of a loaf tin. I sat with my knees up and counted the trees through the gap at the door: forty-one, then thirty-nine when the wind shifted and two of them seemed to lean into one another. A crescent moon hung over the ridge, thin as a fingernail clipping, and Dad said it was too young to be out on its own.

The wick started to sputter around ten. Dad took the spare can to the car and didn't come back, so I unzipped the knot and went looking. He was sitting on the bonnet with his boots crossed, staring up at the sky as if he'd been expecting someone to phone. He said Mum always reckoned the year on the flap was for us, so we'd know which summer we were in when we got home and couldn't remember.

We walked back together with the can banging against his leg. When he refilled the lantern the tent lit up again from the inside, the pines black on the walls and the moon sitting on the peak like a patched hole in the dark. Neither of us said anything about the car keys he'd left on the bonnet. The light was enough.