Black ink line drawing of a mountain, clouds, pine trees, a tent and a campfire above the words KEEP IT SIMPLE, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper.

Mountain camp scene with Keep it simple lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of a peaked mountain with shaded flank, three cloud shapes, several pine trees, a small tent and a campfire with rising smoke, sitting on a horizon line. The words KEEP IT SIMPLE in block capitals run beneath the scene. The drawing uses uniform black ink on white paper with hatching for shading and no colour.

Mountain Cloud Pine tree Tent Campfire Smoke Lettering Camping Landscape

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

So the boy steps off the ferry at Inishcorrie with a trunk of tinned peaches, a wireless set and a donkey he bought in Oban from a man who swore it could climb anything. Now tell me, what does a donkey know about a mountain that has sat in the middle of this island since before the Norse came? Nothing at all. Sit down, the kettle's on, and I'll tell you what happened to him.

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Old Mairi kept the post office then, and she watched him haul those tins up the lane from the pier. She didn't say much. She only pointed at the peak, grey in the morning, with its white cap of cloud, and said, "You'll want a tent and a box of matches, and nothing you can't carry on your own back." He laughed at her, the way young men do, and went up anyway with the donkey complaining behind him.

He was gone three days. The lower slopes gave him pines, tall as chapel steeples, and the wind blew cloud across the ridge like wet washing. On the second night he made a fire by a boulder, and the smoke went up in slow curls that the gulls came down to look at. He told me later he sat there with one tin of beans and realised the donkey was the only thing he had brought that he could not eat, sell or light a match with, and he left it at the foot of the slope where the grass was good.

When he came down on the third morning, the donkey was still waiting by the gate, fat and pleased with itself. The boy was thinner, and he looked at the mountain as if it had been talking to him. He never did bring the trunk up. He said he hadn't needed it. Mairi just nodded at him over the counter and stamped his letter. Keep it simple, she always said, and he did, and the mountain never once asked him to be anything else.