Black and grey realism style forearm tattoo of a mountain range above a pine tree line, with the words think like a mountain and Leopold beneath.

Mountain range and pines with a quote

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a mountain peak with a ridge of rising slopes and a soft cloud band above, set over a row of dark pine trees. Below sit the words think like a mountain in a typewriter style serif, with the name LEOPOLD in capitals underneath, both framed by horizontal rules. The design is in black and grey, with fine outlines and soft shading on the mountain and trees against pale skin.

Realism Lettering Forearm Mountain Pine tree Cloud Quote Text

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

You are forty minutes late to your own speech because the lane up to Glenfarrow has washed out, and the marquee is already humming with people who were promised the forester would keep it short. Your sister's boy, Callum, holds the cards in both hands as if the hill wind might take them.

Keep reading

Rhodri, the bride's father, has asked you twice to keep it light. He wants the view. He had the pines along the ridge marked for thinning last spring, and he says the photographs will be better without them. You tell him you will see. You have walked that ridge for thirty years, and the mountain has never once hurried for anyone's photographs.

When your turn comes you do not read the speech you wrote. You read the passage you copied into a battered field book years ago, about the old wolf dying in the gully, the green fire going out of her eyes, and how the mountain would outlast the wolves and the men who wanted them gone. Nobody laughs. At the back, Rhodri stands with his hands in his pockets and says nothing for a long while.

Afterwards he walks you to the car and does not mention the trees. He asks what the words mean, and you tell him to think slowly, to count in decades, to leave standing whatever has been holding the snow back since before either of you was born. In the morning the felling order is gone from the estate office. Pinned to the gate is a card in the same typewriter face as the order of service, and it says only: leave the ridge.