Black and grey blackwork mountain range tattoo on the side of a foot near the heel, shown in a black and white photograph.

Mountain range tattoo on a foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a jagged mountain range sits on the side of a bare foot, with the peaks drawn as solid black outlines. The linework is bold and simple, with the ridges and peaks defined by clean, dark lines and no shading. The tattoo is set low on a pale, softly lit foot against a light background, and the composition is centred on the mountain motif.

Blackwork Other Mountain Peak Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart stops at the thirtieth meridian, where the mate has drawn a neat black line across the paper and left the rest blank. So when the peaks first lift above the fog, you assume Ruddock has the wrong bearing. He swears on his mother's Bible that it is land. You take the glass from him and count four ridges, sharp as the teeth of a saw left out on a bench, with snow packed into the gullies like salt.

Keep reading

Three more days pass before the wind lets you close. Captain Hettie Crane will not heave to until the water turns the colour of weak tea, and by then the whole crew is hanging over the rail. You take the jolly boat in with Ruddock and two casks. The rock is warmer than you expect, and the peaks that looked so clean from the deck are scored with scree and fissures, so that the far ones look like the first ones drawn in a child's book.

Halfway up the shingle you find a cairn with a tin wedged inside it. Under the lid is a folded page in a hand you do not know, dated thirty-one years back: Ridge holds. Water is north of the second peak. Do not trust the fog. Ruddock laughs and says it must be some joke from the old whalers, but you read it three times and feel its weight settle on your chest like a ship's bell.

On the way back you stop at the edge of the surf and take the pencil from your coat. Below the black line on the chart you draw the coast in a jagged stroke, four peaks in a row, and beside them you write the captain's name, because it was her nerve that brought you here. When Hettie reads it, she says nothing at all. She folds the chart, tucks it under her arm, and steers for home with the land at her back.