Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mountain and pine trees above rolling hills, enclosed in a thin rectangular frame on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain landscape in a rectangular frame on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a peaked mountain above a band of pine trees and rolling hills, all drawn with stippled dotwork shading in black and grey. A thin black rectangular outline frames the scene, which sits vertically on the upper arm of a person photographed from behind against a plain background.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Mountain Pine tree Hill Landscape Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father would not let me touch the glass until I could cut a mitre without wasting a sheet. The autumn I turned sixteen, Mrs Aldridge came in with a pen engraving of Scaur Moor wrapped in a tea towel and asked for it framed square, with no gilt and no fuss, nothing to pull the eye off the hill.

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The picture was all dots. Her husband had drawn it at the kitchen table over one winter, a thousand tiny stabs of nib that thickened into shadow on the crags and thinned out into the pale water of the valley. The pines ran along the bottom edge like a row of combed bristles. My father held it to the window and said that dots were just patience with ink in it, then went out to the yard for a smoke.

Halfway through the mounting I saw the damage. Damp had got into the lower hills and lifted a patch of stipple to nothing, a grey bruise where the foreground dunes should have rolled. I had a fine nib from the drawer and a pot of Indian ink I was not supposed to use without asking. I sat with it for an hour, dotting slowly, matching the spacing by eye until the hills ran on as if nothing had happened. When my father came back he looked at the sheet for a long time, then at me, and said only, 'You'll do.'

Mrs Aldridge collected it the following Saturday. I watched her carry it out under her arm, the frame square and the glass clean, and I thought of her in some later year with rain running down the window and the real hills gone soft beyond it. I still think the bruise is somewhere under my dots, and that nobody living could say which hill is his and which is mine.