Small watercolour design of a circular sunset landscape with a pale moon, lilac mountains and dark pine trees, with a handwritten date below, on textured paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circular sunset landscape watercolour

Colour · Flash

A small circular watercolour scene shows a pale moon above lilac mountains and a dark band of pine trees, set against a sky that fades from grey-blue to peach. The washes are soft with visible paper texture, and the hard black silhouette of the trees gives the base of the circle its weight. A handwritten line in quotation marks sits centred beneath the circle, with the composition placed in the middle of a plain off-white sheet.

Sunset Moon Mountain Tree Landscape Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire only warms the side you're sitting on. My grandmother's grandmother told this one, and she had it from a woman who kept the quarry ledgers at Tarn Hollow, back when the valley still had a name nobody had yet argued over.

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The ledger woman kept a round glass no bigger than a clay bowl, and inside it was a painting she had made with her own hand: the ridge behind the quarry, the pines black along its foot, the moon sitting just above the peaks as if it had been asked to wait. Beneath the circle she had written the day it was made, 25 February 2013, in letters so careful you could still read them with your thumb. Nobody in Tarn Hollow could say what year that was. They only knew it was older than the ford and older than the wall.

One winter the pit-men came up the path asking whether the sky had ever really gone that colour, or whether the painter had made it up. The ledger woman took them to the window and told them the mountains were only lilac in the hour before the lamps lit, that she had sat out on the ridge to watch it, and that the colour had come out wrong on her paper every time until she thinned the wash with rain.

So the three of them went up at dusk and waited. The moon rose pale over the peaks, exactly where the painting had put it, and the old men took off their caps. We still walk up on the nights the ridge turns lilac, and we still take our caps off when the moon comes.