Black and grey photograph of a small blackwork mountain range tattoo on the side of a bare ankle, with the foot raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain peak tattoo on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot is raised against a dim room, showing a small tattoo of jagged mountain peaks in solid black ink on the side of the ankle. The linework is angular and uneven, with some areas filled in and others left as sharp outlines. The image is black and white and the tattoo is the clear focal point against the pale skin.

Blackwork Ankle Mountain Peak Landscape

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 tablet cracked in the kiln, so I scratched the range onto a slab of grey slate instead, and the line came out crooked, the way every true thing does when a man is in a hurry. Lord Ammurapi wanted the peaks set down as an eagle sees them, all at once and in order, but I had only my own two eyes and a cord knotted at every hand's width.

Keep reading

We went up through the cedar in the cold month with four mules and a goatherd named Ishku, who knew which springs were safe and which had killed a donkey the year before. Each dawn I stood where the light came grey from behind the ridge and counted the points against the sky. Some were broad and tired, like loaves left out. Others came up sharp and narrow, shouldering each other as if they had quarrelled over the same stretch of air.

At the high saddle the wind stopped. Ishku sat on a rock, filled his pipe, and told me I was looking at the mountains wrong. They were not a line, he said, but a sentence the earth was still speaking, and a sentence has stops and breaths in it. I did not understand until I pressed the stylus into the slate where the peaks were sharpest and felt the stone resist, then lifted it and let the stroke fade where the ridge dropped into mist. The sharp places I cut deep. The soft places I only traced.

When we came down I rubbed lampblack and mutton fat into every groove so the rain would not wash the ridge away. Ammurapi held the slate to the lamp and asked why half of it looked finished and half looked like a rumour. I told him the mountain itself was half finished. He laughed and had it hung in the hall, where the damp could not reach it.