Black and grey realism tattoo of mountain peaks and a tall pine tree across the outer forearm, shown against a dark background.

Mountain range and pine tree on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a mountain range with shaded peaks rising up the forearm and a dense pine tree at the wrist end of the arm. The mountains are rendered with soft grey shading and fine linework, while the tree is drawn in solid dark ink with detailed needle strokes for the foliage. The image is taken against a plain black background, with the subject's arm and part of a dark t-shirt and jeans visible.

Realism Forearm Mountain Pine tree Forest Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shepherd's daughter, Ilse, went up the grey ridge the morning after the snow stopped, because her brother had gone up it three days before with the last of the ewes and had not come down. Nobody in Clatterby expected him to be found alive. Her mother packed bread, a flask of barley water and a knife with a horn handle, and told her to keep the peaks on her left hand and never on her right, for the right-hand peaks were the ones that turned you round.

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By noon the valley had gone out of sight behind a shoulder of rock. The mountains stood close and pale, their faces scored where the frost had split them, and the only colour left was the dark row of pines below the snowline, standing shoulder to shoulder like men who had been told to wait. Ilse walked beside them. Each time she looked up she found the sun sitting on a different peak, and each time she looked down the pines seemed to have moved a little nearer.

At the foot of the last slope she came to a single pine, taller than the rest and older, its roots gripping the scree like fingers. Her brother sat with his back against the trunk, his coat powdered white, the ewes bunched and breathing around him. He said the tree had told him to stay put, so he had stayed. Ilse asked how a tree could tell a person anything. He pointed at the notches in the bark, dozens of them, each cut by a shepherd who had sat in the same place and waited.

They went down by the line of pines, one hand on each trunk in turn, and the peaks stayed on their left the whole way. At the bottom her mother stood with the lantern lit, though it was only four in the afternoon. Ilse never told her what the tree had said, which was only that a person lost on the mountain should keep the tallest thing in sight and count the trees on the way down.