Black ink pen drawing of a geometric mountain scene inside an inverted triangle, with a stippled sky, hatched peaks and orbiting circles and arrows, shown as a flash design.

Geometric mountain triangle design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

An inverted triangle frames a faceted mountain range drawn with hatching and solid black shading, with a dark shape at the base. Above the peaks, the sky is filled with fine stippling and a few small birds, while circles, dashed lines, arrowheads and a small triangle sit around the outside of the frame. The work is in black ink on white paper, with a balanced, centred composition.

Geometric Dotwork Mountain Triangle Bird Circle Arrow Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyors of Calder Reach have a rule that nobody records a mountain they have not climbed, so on the morning the Queen's clerk sends you north with a brass compass and a sack of quills, you are already sulking about it. The map room smells of linseed and wet slate. Your instructions run to three lines: find the range the old charts call the Inverted Teeth, fix its height, and bring back the sky above it, because the Assembly wants the birds on the margin counted before the tax rolls close.

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The road ends at a ferryman's hut where the river has forgotten how to run downhill. He tells you the peaks point at the earth because the kingdom was folded over once, long ago, like a letter, and whatever was written on its underside still presses up through the rock. You laugh. He does not. He hands you a stick of chalk and tells you to draw the dashed line from his door to the first summit, and not to lift the pen, because lifted lines are how travellers get lost.

You climb for three days through stippled cloud that settles on your sleeves like grit. Small birds, or perhaps only flecks of ink, cross the sky above you and vanish whenever you look straight at them. At the foot of the last peak a black chasm opens, and the wind rising out of it smells of ink and river water. You set the compass on a flat stone and the needle spins once, then settles pointing back the way you came, toward the valley and the hut and the kingdom's paper crown.

You sketch what you can: triangles, arrowheads, a small circle for the sun you never find. When you finally reach the Assembly, the clerk unrolls your survey and frowns at the margins. Where the peaks should be there is only your own handwriting, and beneath it, pressing up through the ink, a faint dotted line that runs straight to your door. You lift your pen to correct it and find that you cannot.