Two black ink line drawings of pine forests below mountain peaks, with campfires and tents and the words Sleep Outside beneath each.

Mountain pines and Sleep Outside lettering

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Two ink drawings stack vertically, each showing a mountain peak above a row of pine trees with a small campfire and tent at the base. The lettering reads Sleep Outside in capitals under each scene. The linework is fine and uses hatching and stippling on the mountain slopes, with solid black trees and no colour.

Fine line Mountain Pine tree Forest Campfire Tent Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Leave the kettle on the stone, it'll sing when it's ready. My father never slept under a roof if he could help it. Every August he'd bundle us into the van, drive until the tarmac gave up somewhere past the Dyfi, then haul the canvas up to the tree line on our backs. I was too small for the poles, so I carried the tin of peaches and complained the whole way.

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The summer the lower path flooded, we pitched under the pines with the peak standing over us like a grey sentry. Mum wanted the bunkhouse. She said the damp would find us in the night. Dad only shook his head, struck a match in the drizzle, and fed it tufts of dry moss until a cone caught and spat. 'Sleep outside,' he told her, and he didn't say it unkindly. We did. The stars came out between the branches one at a time, as though somebody was counting them in.

He's been gone four winters now. I still walk up with the tent on my back, though my knees have opinions about it. I lay the ring of stones, gather the dead wood, and light the fire the slow way, with a match and patience. Last week a girl from the hostel asked me why I bothered when there was a perfectly good bed in the valley.

I didn't have an answer for her, so I showed her instead. I left the flap open, and the smoke went up in a loose curl past the trees, and the sky filled with its usual crowd of watchers.