Traditional black and grey log cabin tattoo with pine trees and smoke on the back of a hand, with the words AND GUIDE ME HOME below.

Log cabin and lettering on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A log cabin with a smoking chimney sits in front of tall pine trees, with a muddy path or ground beneath it, all on the back of a hand. The cabin and trees are drawn with bold outlines and grey shading, and the lettering below reads AND GUIDE ME HOME in solid black capitals. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, with a faint pinkish wash in the ground area, and the design fills the frame.

Traditional Lettering Hand Cabin Pine tree Smoke Chimney Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Show had sold its elephant, two ponies and the big top's centre pole, and what remained of it was grinding north on three wheels and a prayer. Dan Halloran drove the lead wagon with a lamp hung from the axle, because the lamps inside had gone to pay the feed bill. Behind him his daughter Mae walked beside the mules, counting the trees, as she had counted them since the last village, and they had not changed.

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On the sixth night the fog came off the lake and the road stopped being a road. Dan halted the wagons and said they would wait for morning. Mae did not wait. She saw a thread of smoke above the pines, grey against grey, and walked toward it with a lantern, singing the one hymn her mother used to sing in the ring while the acrobats climbed. Her voice was thin in the wet air, but it carried, and the smoke seemed to lean toward it.

The cabin had a lit window, a door on the latch, a kettle on the hob and a table laid for six with the bread already cut. Nobody came. Mae called out and the trees gave her own voice back to her. On the table lay an old playbill for the Halloran Brothers' Show, dated the year the show first came north, with a pencilled note underneath: Keep the fire in. They always find it.

Mae brought the others up at first light. Dan stood in the doorway a long while, then took off his hat and sat down at the table, and for the first time in a year he did not count anything. They pitched the tent in the clearing that morning, and when the sun came through the pines the pink wash of the ground looked almost like sawdust under the ring.