Black and grey traditional tattoo on a thigh showing mountains, pine trees, a rising sun with rays, two roses and the script Let's be Adventurous.

Mountain lake scene with script on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular design shows two peaks beside a lake, with pine trees on each side and a sun with radiating rays above. Two roses sit at the lower left and a leaf sprig curves along the lower right, and the words Let's be Adventurous run along the bottom edge. The bold outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading on the mountains and water, all in black ink and grey tones.

Traditional Dotwork Lettering Thigh Mountain Lake Pine tree Sun Ray Rose Leaves Script Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Penrose broke the skin of ice on the trough with the heel of her boot while the sun cleared the ridge above Hollin Tarn. Her nephew Owen had been sent up from the valley to help with the ewes, and he stood at the gate with his collar turned up, complaining that the tarn was too cold to swim in and too far to walk round.

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She had kept Scar Foot Farm for forty years, and the lake had frozen over only twice in that time. Owen wanted to haul the sledge across to the far shore, where the pines grew down to the water, and cut the holly the vicar had asked for at the chapel. Agnes said the ice would bear where the spring came in and nowhere else. He asked how she knew. She told him about her husband, who had gone out in the hard winter of 1979 to prove the same thing and come back with a story and no boots.

They went anyway, roped together, testing each step with the crook. The peaks behind the farm kept the sun longer than the valley did, and the rays fanned out above them as if someone had drawn them with a compass. Halfway across, the ice sang under their feet, one long note like a wet finger round the rim of a glass. Owen laughed. Agnes did not.

On the far shore they cut the holly, and while Owen dragged the sledge up the bank he found initials scratched into a flat grey rock by the water, with a date and a line beneath them: Let's be adventurous. Agnes knew the careful capitals at once. She took the holly from him without a word, and walked back over ice that had, after all, held.