Black and grey realism tattoo of a tall hilltop monument, a standing stone structure, a church and a dove across a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Hilltop monument and church landscape on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a landscape scene showing a tall obelisk-like monument on a hill, a stone dolmen-style structure, a church tower and a church with a spire, and a dove in flight at the lower edge. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, with wispy clouds and textured stone and foliage. The ink is entirely grey and black, and the scene wraps across the upper arm and onto the shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Hill Spire Dove Bird Landscape Cloud Stone

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

Rain again, and still you lot come to the stalls, so I'll tell this quick before the tarpaulins sag and the leeks go to soup. Hold your hats, you at the back. Up on Gallow Hill there stands a pillar of grey stone, taller than three men, that a widow named Agnes Penhale had raised for her husband. He was a sea captain who sailed out one March and never came home, and she told the masons to carve it so high the gulls would have to bow to it.

Keep reading

Beside the pillar she left the old standing stones where they lay, a great flat table of rock propped on three legs, because her husband had proposed to her there and she wasn't about to move it. Below them the church bells rang every hour for the drowned men of the parish, and Agnes climbed the hill each Sunday with a crust in her apron pocket. She'd scatter it on the stone and wait for the doves to come down from the church roofs. Nobody in town thought much of it, until the spring the bells stopped because the sexton had died and nobody would pull the rope.

That Sunday a single grey dove came up from the valley alone, circled the pillar twice, and landed on the stone table with a loop of brass wire round one leg. On the wire hung a ring, small and warm from being carried, engraved on the inside with a date in March. Agnes sat down in the wet grass and laughed until the rain got into her mouth. Her husband had never been found, but his ring had come home on a bird, and she was sure of it. They say she carried the ring all her days and fed the doves until she was buried under the pillar's shadow.

Now, who wants the last of the leeks? They're half price, and the rain will have them soon enough.