Black and grey tattoo of mountains inside a dotted circle, with a script quote beneath it, on the upper back of a person seen from behind.

Mountains and script quote on the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fine-line mountain range with shaded peaks and a small lake sits inside a circle edged with fine dots. Below it, a handwritten script quote reads She walks in starlight in another world across several lines. The image is in black and grey ink, shot straight on from behind with the subject's head cropped at the top.

Lettering Dotwork Back Mountain Lake Circle Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's older than my grandmother and twice as stubborn. Pull that stool close to the stove and I'll tell you about the summer the surveyor came up to Llyn Carrig, when the peaks still wore their snow like collars and nobody in the valley had thought to give the water a name.

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Hal Pennick was twenty and had never seen a mountain he couldn't measure. He pitched his theodolite on the shore and inked the ridge line, every shoulder and gully, then sat up nights by a candle finishing the shading. Each evening the lake took the stars and held them, and each evening he counted them and got a different number. Old Mair from the farm below brought him bread and told him not to trust the water. "Something walks the far shore when the moon's thin," she said. "She carries a lantern made of nothing."

He laughed, but one night he saw her. A woman in grey wool crossing the stones without any light at all, and the sky above her so thick with stars that her shadow fell backwards onto the lake. He followed as far as the reeds. She stopped and turned, and the water behind her was no longer water but a wide country of lit windows and straight roads, a town where people laughed in a language he almost knew. She lifted one hand. He lifted his. Then the reeds were only reeds.

In the morning he tore the drawing from his book and nailed it to Mair's door, the mountains with a blank patch in the middle where the water should sit. Sit still now. That sheet still hangs there. Every surveyor who comes up asks why the lake has no name, and every one of them walks the shore after dark, looking for the woman who walks in starlight in another world.