Black and grey castle tattoo with a full moon and mountains inside a dotted triangle, placed across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle, moon and mountains on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a castle with several towers and a pointed spire, set in front of a full moon and rising from rocky mountains with leafy detail at the base. The castle and moon are shaded with fine gradients, while a dotted triangle frames the whole design. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the upper back against pale skin.

Dotwork Geometric Back Castle Moon Mountain Triangle Leaves Tower

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

Hesketh had walked the ridge for three days with a theodolite that kept losing its bubble, and by the fourth evening the mountain had stopped looking like a mountain and started looking like a question. The Ministry map showed nothing above Scarrow Fell but scree and sheep. Yet from the valley the full moon rose every night directly behind a notch in the peaks, and somebody had built into that notch a keep of grey stone with a spire like a sharpened pencil.

Keep reading

He sat on a boulder with the cold coming through his trousers and drew what he saw: towers stepping down the rock, a long hall with a row of narrow windows, and at the base, laurel and bramble growing where no bramble should grow at that height. He pegged three survey points at the corners of the view, because that was how the Ministry liked things closed. The triangle held. Something inside it did not want to be measured.

At dusk a bell rang from the spire, though the spire was a day's climb away. A woman came down the scree carrying a lantern with a pale glass globe, and she asked him, quite politely, whether he had come to buy the mountain or to be kept by it. He said he had come to correct a map. She laughed, a dry sound like slate sliding, and said the map had been correcting itself for three hundred years.

He returned to the Ministry with a blank sheet. In the box marked Feature he wrote nothing, then drew a small dotted triangle and left the inside empty. Each winter after, a clerk in the basement archive found the same shape in the margins of the Scarrow survey, a tower's tip poking up through the ink, and nobody could say who had put it there.