Forearm tattoo of a black mountain range over a blue watercolour-style wash, with thin script written beneath it.

Mountain range and blue wash on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A healed or fresh tattoo of a row of jagged black mountain peaks runs across the forearm. Below them a loose band of blue ink with a watercolour look sits under the peaks, with small dark splatters and a thin dark line of script underneath. The blue wash and black linework are shown against plain skin in a photo taken indoors.

Forearm Mountain Mountain range Watercolour Script Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edda had walked the edge of the forest every morning since the thaw, past the last fence of Lower Ashby, where the larches gave way to bracken and the bracken to grey stone. From the stile she could count the peaks without taking her eyes off the path: five teeth and a sixth that hid its face in cloud. Below them the tarn lay the colour of a jay's wing, and the only man who had ever tried to paint it was Tomas Greer, who had come up from the valley with a tin of watercolours and a bad knee.

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He painted in the mornings, sitting on an upturned crate by the reeds, and he let her watch on the condition that she did not talk. She learned that the dark ink was for the rock and the blue was for everything else, and that he flicked the spatter from a loaded brush by tapping it against his thumb, so the specks fell where they liked. On the back of every sheet he wrote a line in pencil, quick and slanting, and never let her read it until the paper had dried. 'One life,' he said the last time, folding the sheet twice. 'That's all the mountains ask.'

He left at the end of August with the crate strapped to his pack and the knee no better. Edda kept the sheets he had given her, all but the one with the writing, which he had taken with him. Through the winter she traced the peaks with her finger and found that the blue had bled faintly through to the back, so that every ridge seemed to hold a pool beneath it.

In March a parcel came from a town she had never visited. Inside was the missing sheet, with a fresh wash of blue across the tarn, and a pencilled line she could finally read: the water had frozen over at Candlemas, and he had painted it anyway. Edda pinned the sheet above the range where the warmth could reach it, and each morning she checked the lake against the paper to see whether the blue had moved.