Black and grey hatched mountain range tattoo across the inner forearm near the wrist, with part of an arrow and a circle visible above it.

Hatched mountain range band on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A band of mountain peaks runs across the inner forearm, with the highest peak in the centre and smaller peaks either side. Each peak is outlined in black, and the shaded sides are filled with evenly spaced parallel hatching, while the lit faces are left as bare skin. Part of an arrow and a circular outline appear at the top of the frame, and the photograph is shot in black and white.

Forearm Mountain Peak Arrow Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third hour the sun has slid behind the central peak, and you read the range the way the old surveyor taught you, by its shadows. The lit faces are bare white rock. The shaded flanks are dark with pine and scored with lines of scree, and each one tells you how far the next ridge lies. Your feet are wrapped in goatskin. The message tube against your ribs is warm from your own body and nothing else.

Keep reading

The surveyor, Halvard of Tarsa, drew the chain on a wax tablet and made you copy it until you could draw it blind. Three peaks, the middle one tallest, the left one shouldering up like a man ducking under a beam. He said a runner who cannot draw the mountains will walk off a cornice believing he is still on the road. You laughed at that. Up here you do not laugh. You count.

Near the saddle a hunter's arrow stands upright in a cairn, its fletching bleached grey, and beside it someone has scratched a ring the size of a sun. You touch both, as Halvard showed you, for luck and for the way down. The wind comes over the top carrying the smoke of the valley, which means the garrison is still awake, which means the message will arrive before anyone needs the beacon fire.

When you reach the far side the light has gone and the ridges are only outlines now, flat and dark, the same shape as the ones on the tablet. You place the tube in the commander's hand. He asks whether the pass is clear. You tell him the mountains are where you left them, and you are not certain, for once, whether that was a joke.