Three views of a forearm with a black and grey mountain landscape tattoo above a band of zigzags and black bands, styled in blackwork and dotwork on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain landscape armband on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows three side-by-side views of the same forearm, each with a wide black band near the elbow, a thin zigzag line beneath it, and a mountain range with a starry sky and a dark pine tree line below. The mountains are built from fine dots and short strokes, with heavier black shading in the tree line and the lower edge of the band. The palette is entirely black and grey against a pale background, and the arrangement is symmetrical across the three views.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Mountain Star Pine tree Landscape Zigzag Armband Night sky

Find an artist for this

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

The pass closed the week the first snow came, and the innkeeper's daughter, Marta, was the only one who knew the old road over the ridge. Her father had kept the inn at Haldenfurt for thirty winters, and every one of them he had sworn the mountains were not worth the looking at. He said the peaks were only rock with a hat of white on them, and the stars were just the cold showing its teeth.

Keep reading

On the ninth night a carter came down out of the dark with a broken axle and a lantern that had gone out. He asked the way to the valley towns. Marta gave him a bowl of barley soup and walked him to the window, where the sky had cleared all at once. The stars were thick above the black teeth of the pines, and below them the peaks stood pale and sharp, cut from the same grey as the moon.

The carter counted the stars and gave up at forty. Marta told him that her mother had made her learn the names of the peaks before she could read, so that she would never walk off a path she could not name. The carter laughed and said his own wife had made him learn the names of the saints for the same reason, and it had got him nowhere.

In the morning the axle was mended and the road lay open. Marta watched the cart climb until it was a speck against the zigzag of the high snow. Her father came up behind her, stamping his boots, and looked at the ridge for a long time. He did not say the mountains were not worth the looking at. He said only that the soup had been good, and that she should take the fresh bread up to the dairy before it froze.