Traditional style colour tattoo on the thigh showing a sun over snowy peaks and a river, framed by a rope border and the words If it's the mountains bending rivers you will have them.

Mountain, river and sun scene on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo on the outer thigh shows a sun rising behind jagged snow-capped peaks, with a river, green trees and clouds in an oval panel. The quote is lettered in black around the top and bottom of the oval, and a red flower with green leaves sits below. Bold black outlines, flat fills in orange, yellow, blue, green and red, and a rope-style border give it a classic traditional look.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Mountain Sun River Tree Cloud Flower Leaves Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had been breaking ice on the trough since five, and the beck below the top field had risen overnight, brown and loud, shouldering against the stone wall her grandfather built. The lambing shed was dry, but the lower pasture was going under, and the ewes were bunched on the rise like a dropped handful of wool.

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Her neighbour Tom Hebden came up the track in his Land Rover with a roll of orange baler twine and a face that said he had already decided it was hopeless. 'You'll not turn that,' he said, looking down at the water. 'Your dad tried in seventy-eight.' Maud knew the story. Every winter in the valley someone told it. Her father Ned had walked to the lip of the gorge with a shovel and a bottle of whisky and sworn a river could be taught where to go. He came home soaked to the shoulders and said nothing more about it for years, except to hum the line a fiddler had sung at the spring show: if it's the mountains bending rivers, you'll have them.

They dug anyway. Maud and Tom cut a channel through the frozen turf, levered the wall stones aside with a crowbar, and let the beck find the easier fall toward the old quarry hollow. Their hands went numb and then stopped hurting. By noon the water had turned, slow at first and then with a sudden rush, and the lower field began to drain like a bath being emptied.

That evening the cloud broke over the Pillar and the sun came through red and low, lighting the snow along the peaks. Maud stood at the gate with the twine still in her pocket. The mountains hadn't moved an inch. She had only shown the water a different road, and that, her father would have said, was the whole trick of it.