Black linework tattoo on the upper arm of a person showing a hatched mountain peak and pine trees resting in an outlined open hand.

Mountain and pine trees in a hand on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black outline of an open hand holds a hatched mountain peak with pine trees along a ridge line below it. The linework uses dense cross-hatching for the rock faces and single strokes for the trees and hand, with soft grey tones in the shading. The image is a close side view of the upper arm against a plain grey top and a softly blurred room behind.

Fine line Upper arm Mountain Hand Pine tree Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the gas is low and the rain is making its own noise on the roof. You want the one about the mountain that could not be carried. Everyone in this city has heard it wrong, so listen properly. Long before the tower blocks, a woman named Ysolde Brand walked out of the lowlands with a heel of bread and a brass key. She had been told the mountain at the edge of the world was lonely, and she believed it, because she had been lonely herself.

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The wardens laughed at her. Mountains are not for hands, they said. But at the foot of the ridge she found pines growing out of the scree, thin as pencil strokes, each one holding on to a crack in the stone. She knelt and cupped her palms, the way you would lift a sparrow off the road, and she asked the mountain whether it would come down far enough to be looked after. The rock said nothing. The pines did, in the wind, which is how pines talk.

So she carried it. Not all of it, only the peak and the dark line of trees along the ridge, held in the cup of one hand. Down the valley, through the market on Harrow Lane, past the clock that struck thirteen at midnight. A boy asked whether it was heavy. She said only as heavy as anything you decide to keep.

When she reached the river she opened her fingers, and the mountain settled back where it had always been, a little lower, a little greyer at the crown. The trees stayed with her. Hold your own hand out in the dark and you can still feel the ridge running along the heel of it, the weight of something that chose to stay.