Colour tattoo of a snow-capped mountain above a lake inside a circular badge with orange leaves and coordinate text, on the forearm.

Mountain and lake badge with coordinates

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A circular badge shows a grey and white mountain peak above a blue lake and dark green pine trees, set against a pale green sky with a small orange star. Bold black outlines frame the scene, with the coordinates 40°20'N 105°42'W across the top, an elevation of 14,440FT along the bottom, and orange leaves forming a wreath around the sides. Shading on the mountain is soft and painterly, and the colours are bright and evenly balanced across the composition.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Mountain Lake Pine tree Leaves Wreath Coordinates Badge Sky Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hollis Greaves had pencilled the figures into his ledger before he ever saw the peak, because the instrument said so and the instrument had never once lied to him. Forty degrees, twenty minutes north. A hundred and five, forty-two west. Fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet of rock that nobody in Garnet Flats had bothered to name. His wife, Maud, read the numbers over his shoulder at supper and said they sounded like a hymn nobody sang any more.

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The survey took eleven weeks. Hollis carried the chain and Maud's brother Ned carried the tripod up scree that slid under every step. On the ninth morning they reached a shelf where a lake lay so still it held the sky, green as the inside of a bottle, and a row of pines leaned down to drink. Hollis set up the theodolite and found the summit was not where his map put it. It stood a hundred feet higher and a mile east, and the lake appeared on no chart in the county.

He wrote it all down in plain ink and did not tell the office. He told Maud instead, and she laughed until she had to sit on the porch step. Every autumn after that she sent him back up the same track with a basket of rust-coloured leaves gathered from the aspens below town, and every autumn he pressed one into the margin beside the figures, a little closer to the edge each year.

The ledger went to the county in 1951, its margins full of leaves. Nobody has found the lake since, though a clerk once noticed the pressed leaves and wondered who had been so fond of a number. Maud kept the last one flat behind glass above the kitchen sink. When visitors asked what the figures meant, she only tapped the glass and said the mountain was exactly where he had left it.