Colour drawing of a tattoo design showing a purple and orange mountain inside a golden laurel wreath, with the words Don't paint me black when I used to be golden in black lettering.

Mountain in a golden laurel wreath with lettering

Lettering · Colour · Flash

The design shows a mountain peak shaded in purple, orange and yellow against a teal sky, with fine hatched linework on its surface. A wreath of yellow laurel leaves with crossed stems at the base frames the mountain. The words Don't paint me black when I used to be golden run around the wreath in black hand-drawn lettering on a plain off-white background.

Lettering Botanical Mountain Laurel wreath Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mountain had been watching the harbour for three days when Edith finally walked down to the shingle with a flask and a folded map. Her brother had sold the boat in March, and the new owner kept it tied at the far end of the quay where the gulls sat in rows on the rail. She told herself she had come for the air. The wind off the water smelled of diesel and kelp, and across the bay the old peak stood up through the haze, its flanks banded purple where the shadow lay and gold along the ridge where the morning caught it.

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A fisherman mending nets nodded at her without looking up. He had known her father. He had known the boat's name, which was Halcyon, painted in letters so faded that only the H still read clearly. Edith unfolded the map on the bonnet of her car and pinned its corners with stones. Pencil crosses marked the anchorages they had never reached, and beside one of them, in her father's cramped hand, someone had written the word golden with a question mark after it.

She had never understood the question mark. Her father used to say the mountain went black in the evenings, that it lost its colour the moment the sun slipped behind the shoulder of the headland, and that a man could steer by it only while it still glowed. Standing there with the flask going cold in her hand, Edith watched the light slide down the slope, gold, then amber, then the deep bruised violet he had always called home. She folded the map along its old creases and left the stones where they lay for the tide to take.