Fine line black tattoo of three mountain peaks on the upper back, near the shoulder blade, on a person with dark curly hair.

Mountain peaks on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the upper back of a person with dark, curly hair falling over the left shoulder. A small tattoo of three mountain peaks sits to the right of the spine, drawn with thin, sketchy black linework, with short horizontal strokes at the base suggesting ridges or snow. The skin is lightly lit against a soft, out-of-focus background.

Fine line Back Mountain Peak Landscape Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third peak was the one nobody in Thornbeck could count from the valley floor, so in the spring after the flood Edda Rook took a heel of bread, a flint and her brother's old boots and went up through the birch wood at the edge of the village. The birches thinned into bracken, the bracken into scree, and the scree gave way to grey slabs that hummed under her soles when the wind came over them.

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On the second ridge she met a goatherd named Tobin Sallow, who had lived in a stone hut longer than anyone could remember. He kept a pot of ink made from oak galls and a goose quill, and on the whitewashed wall of his hut he had drawn the peaks, one line at a time, with short strokes at the bottom where the snow lay late. "You'll want to see them properly before you can say what they are," he said, and handed her the quill.

She drew the first peak, then the second, leaning against the cold stone. When she reached the third her hand shook and the line went wild and sketchy, a ridge that would not settle. Tobin laughed and said that was the right way, since mountains never sat still for anyone looking at them. When Edda came back down to Thornbeck three days later, the village had already counted the peaks and found there was always one more.

Every spring after that she climbed up with her brother's boots and added a short stroke beneath the ridges for each neighbour who had gone up and not come down. By the time her hair turned grey the strokes ran the length of Tobin's wall, and on her mother's kitchen table, in soot from the hearth, three peaks sat above a row of lines that nobody in the village liked to count aloud.