Black and grey circular tattoo on a forearm showing mountains, a river, pine trees and a moon, with the words Looking for gold... or a hand to hold above and below.

Mountain and river badge with lettering on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular badge design shows a mountain range with a peak at the centre, a crescent moon and wispy clouds in the sky, and a winding river flowing towards the viewer past pine trees. The linework is bold with fine hatching and stippled shading for the hills and water, and the design is entirely black ink. The lettering arcs above and below the circle in a clean sans serif capitals style, and the photo is taken straight on against a pale skin background.

Forearm Mountain River Pine tree Moon Cloud Lettering Badge Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corin had walked three days up the Sallow river with a pick on his shoulder and a tin of lamp oil he had not yet needed, and every night the moon rose over the same grey shoulder of the range and looked, he thought, faintly disappointed in him. The old maps called the peak Hollin's Tooth. The miners in Ardcombe called it nothing at all, because nobody who went up there came back to argue about names.

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He reached the lower falls on the fourth morning and found the first colour in a crevice under a pine root: a sliver of something that was not quartz. He held it to the light for a long time. Then he tucked it into his cheek the way his grandmother used to hide sugar, and sat down on a flat stone to work out what a man was supposed to do with a fortune he could not carry.

He was still sitting there when the moon came full over the Tooth. Ila's footsteps came up the path behind him, slow and sure, and she sat down beside him without asking what he had found. "Gold," he said at last, and opened his hand. She looked at the fleck, then at the river bending past the pines towards them, then at him. "Gold is a thing you dig for," she said. "The other thing you only find if you stop walking."

He let the river have the sliver back. They went down together in the moonlight, the path too narrow for two, so he let her go first and watched the way she lifted her lantern at each bend to show him where to put his feet. By the time they reached Ardcombe the pick was rusting in the stream and his hand was in hers, and neither of them ever went looking for the Tooth again.