Small black dotwork and fine line tattoo of a mountain range on the inner upper arm, shown against a plain white wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain range on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised mountain range with a tall central peak flanked by lower ridges and a smaller peak on the left. The outlines are fine single lines, and the shading is built from dense stippled dots that give the rock faces texture and depth. The design is in black ink only and sits centrally on the upper arm, with the photograph taken against a plain white wall.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Mountain Peak Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tip above Glan Rhos had been growing since before my mother was born, and by the time I was nine it had weather of its own. Clouds sat on the summit in the mornings, and rain came down the scree in grey ribbons, and the men coming up the lane from the pit would look at it the way you might look at a relative who had not been well.

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My father drew it. He sat on the back step with a propelling pencil and a sheet torn from the colliery calendar, and he never drew a line where he could make a dot instead. Stipple, he called it, though he only knew the word from a magazine someone had left in the Institute. The tall peak he named the Pen, after the manager's office window it faced, and the shoulder to the left he called Dai's Tump, for a lad who went down on the Monday and came back up on the Thursday, complaining about the food. 'You have to make the rock look handled,' he said, and pressed so hard the paper shone.

The cage stopped for good in the spring they announced on the wireless. The men walked out with their tools in hessian bags, and nobody mentioned the tip again. Within a few years the council had seeded it, and the mountain went green and soft, and a boy could cycle up its flank without once thinking of coal.

The drawing hangs above the sink now, gone the colour of weak tea. I counted the dots once, on a bad night, just to have something for my hands, and gave up somewhere past four thousand. It seemed about right for a mountain that had been carried out one bucket at a time.