Black and grey dotwork tattoo of mountains, a partial moon and small stars on the inner upper arm of a woman in a white t-shirt, with a mountain landscape behind her.

Mountain, moon and stars on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white t-shirt shows a tattoo of a mountain range with a partly visible moon and scattered small stars on the inner upper arm. The mountains are built from stippled dots and short lines, with the darkest areas near the lower ridges. The image is in black and grey, with a sunlit road and forested hillside behind the arm.

Dotwork Upper arm Mountain Moon Star Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire will not wait for slow ears. You want the ridge story, the one about Ysolde's crossing, and I will tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the stones counted out in the dark. Put another handful of dung on, Tomas. The moon is late this month and the sky is still full of the old dust.

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Before the Sleepers woke, the high country beyond the Sawtooth had no names, only edges. The people of the valley called it the Long Teeth and said no one came back from it. Ysolde was a salt-trader's daughter with a cracked pack and a mapmaker's stubbornness. She carried a copper compass that had been her father's, though it pointed wherever the cold wanted it to. On the third night above the snowline the moon rose behind a shoulder of rock, only half of it showing, like a coin pressed into stone. The stars that came after were not the bright sheet she had been taught to steer by. They were small, scattered and hard, and she counted them the way you count sheep, and the count added up to a path.

She followed them. Each night she set her pack against a boulder, lit no fire, and watched the moon slide along the ridgeline while the stars pricked the sky above it. Where the stone was darkest, along the lower ridges, the wind had worn the rock into fine grained furrows that caught at her fingers like a rasp, and she learnt to read the land by touch as well as by sight. On the seventh dawn the Teeth opened, and there below her lay a green bowl of a valley that nobody had mapped.

So when you go up tomorrow, and you will, remember this: the mountains do not hide the way. They keep it in the sky, waiting for someone patient enough to count. Now bed. Tomas, leave the bowl. The moon will be up before the sheep are.