Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm, shown inside a diamond shape with a moon, pine trees and mountains above wavy horizontal bands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon and mountains in a diamond on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A diamond-shaped design shows a moon, a mountain range and pine trees with small stars in the upper section. The lower part is cut into horizontal bands containing wavy, serpentine forms and stippled dots. The image is black and grey, with fine dotted shading and bold outlines against a plain pale background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Moon Mountain Pine tree Star Wave Snake Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late that year, and Harriet Lowe went down to the lower field with an axe because the beck had jammed with ice and the water was backing up into the byre. She found the snake where the ice was thinnest, lying along the bank like a rope someone had dropped, its scales the grey of wet slate and dusted with frost.

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It was not dead. It lifted its head when she came near and looked at her the way the old ewes looked at a gate they did not trust. Her grandmother had told her that the snakes of the beck were the same ones that lived under the high mountain, and that when the moon was full in winter they swam up the water to see who was still awake on the farm.

Harriet did not cut the ice. She knelt, put her bare hand flat on the bank, and waited. After a while the snake slid forward, and under the broken sheet it opened a channel no wider than a wrist, and the water began to run again, quietly, towards the sea.

Her father found her there at dawn, asleep against the fence post with frost on her eyelashes. Above the ridge the moon was going down behind the pines, and the mountain was white to its shoulders. He said nothing about the axe. The field drained by noon, and the snake was never seen again, though every winter after, when the beck froze, someone on the farm left a bowl of milk on the bank, and it was always empty by morning.