Colour tattoo of a mountain, pine trees, a lake and yellow flowers inside a diamond frame on the outer thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Mountain lake and pines on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A diamond-shaped panel shows a grey shaded mountain under a blue sky with two birds, with tall black pine trees on the left and right and a turquoise lake at the base. Yellow flowers with green leaves spill from the lower right edge of the frame. The outlines are bold and dark, the trees are solid black, and the mountain and foreground use fine stippled shading, with colour concentrated in the sky, lake and flowers.

Neo-trad Dotwork Thigh Mountain Pine tree Lake Bird Sky Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so I walked the last stretch to Halloran Lake with the mail sack over one shoulder and the radio dead in my pocket. Nobody at the station had believed me when I said the pass would hold until October. Nobody believed much of anything after the fire year, but the pines had come back thick on the north slope, black as ink against the rock, and the water in the lake kept that green-blue colour it had when my father first took me up there as a boy.

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Mrs Okafor was waiting on her porch with two kettles already on the stove. She had a letter from her son in Vancouver, the first in eleven months, and she wanted me to read it aloud because her eyes had gone soft and the print swam. I read it sitting on the step while the birds came down to the shallows, three of them, then two, then one going off over the ridge in the direction of the summit. The son wrote about rain, about a job at a sawmill, about a woman named Thea who laughed at his jokes. Mrs Okafor listened with her hands folded and nodded at the parts about the rain.

When I stood to go she pressed a jar of yellow honey into my hands, the flowers that grew along the lake edge in late spring, the ones her husband had called mountain gold. She said the bees had worked harder this year than any year before, as though they knew something. I told her the pass was clear and I would be back Thursday. On the path down, the lake caught the last of the light and held it, the way it always had, and I thought of that letter folded in my breast pocket, ending with a promise to come home by the first snow.