Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mountain landscape with a cabin and pine trees in a circle, with the words Home is where the mountains are, on an upper arm.

Mountain landscape with Home is where the mountains are

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo inside a circular frame shows a peaked mountain range, a small cabin, pine trees and a winding path. The mountains are built from stippled dots and fine linework, with soft shading on the slopes. The words HOME IS WHERE above and THE MOUNTAINS ARE below follow the curve of the circle, and the photo is taken straight on.

Dotwork Lettering Upper arm Mountain Cabin Tree Landscape Path Circle Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copper plate had to be stippled by hand, because the press would swallow any line finer than a hair, so Ivo Brennan sat at the bench for three weeks pricking the Carrow range into it one dot at a time. His wife brought him tea he forgot to drink. I was the boy who cleaned the burin and counted the dots for him, badly, and he never once corrected me, which was worse.

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The commission was for the county survey, and Harvey Dunn, the surveyor, with his waxed moustache and his ledger of deeds, wanted the ridge exactly as it stood. Ivo drew it so. Then, in the lower left, where the road bent towards the tarn, he added a cabin with a crooked chimney and two pines leaning as if they had been listening. Dunn saw the proof and said the cabin was on no deed in the county. Ivo said a man ought to be able to find his way back somewhere.

The plates went to the printers in Carlisle that autumn. Dunn was thrown from his gig on the Keswick road in November, and his widow asked for the survey to be sent to her house, where it hung unframed in the hall. Ivo never went up the fell again. He kept one proof in his coat, folded so the cabin showed.

When we cleared his bench after the funeral I found the last plate under the stove, pricked through at the chimney, the dots worn smooth where a thumb had rested. On a Sunday I took it up the path he had drawn. There was no cabin, only a dry stone wall and a gate standing open, and below it a light in the valley that came from no window I could find.