Large black and grey landscape back tattoo with mountains, trees and a sun, plus German script across the upper back, seen from behind by a lake.

Landscape back piece with German script

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person stands with arms raised, showing a large back tattoo that covers the upper and mid back with a scenic landscape of mountains, trees and a sun. Fine shading and detailed linework build up the trees, rock and sky, with a line of German script across the shoulder blades and smaller ornaments on the neck and upper arm. The ink is entirely grey and black against a soft, blurred lake background.

Realism Back Upper arm Landscape Mountain Tree Sun Script Ornament Bird Building

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The lift in Carrick House has been broken since Tuesday, so I have been climbing to the eleventh floor with the shopping and counting the landings the way you used to count lighthouse flashes. On the fourth floor someone has painted over the damp with a sky, and I stop there every time now. Blue fading to grey at the top, a ridge of mountains with snow on the very tips, and a low sun coming up behind a stand of dark pines. Nobody on the estate knows who did it. Mrs Okafor thinks it was the council, which is a joke.

Mr Brandt on the ninth floor, the retired joiner, says the words painted under the sun are German, put there by his wife's cousin before she went back to Hamburg. He won't translate them for me. He just taps the wall and says a person's will is their own heaven, then shuts his door before I can point out that a heaven with a leaking roof is not much of a heaven.

Last night the power went off across the whole block and I sat on the stairs with a torch. The beam caught the paint and for a moment the sun looked lit from behind, and the mountains seemed a long way off instead of a wall away. In the lower corner there is a heron standing on one leg above the rooftops. I had walked past that paint for two years and never once seen the bird.

I think I'll go up to the roof to see the view rather than wait for the lift. Come in the spring and bring the old map of the lake. We can work out the words together, and you can tell me I am wrong about the heaven.

Love, Ruth