Black and grey circular design of a mountain range, pine trees and stars beneath a quote in capitals, drawn in a woodcut style.

Mountains, pines and stars in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A circular black linework design shows a mountain range and dense pine trees beneath a night sky scattered with stars. A quote in white capital letters runs across the upper half of the circle, set in the sky. The image is in black ink on a pale grey background, with bold outlines and simple hatched shading in the trees and hills.

Mountain Pine tree Star Night sky Quote Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edda Marrow had kept the lamp at the top of Blackwater Lane for forty winters, and in all that time nobody in Harrowcombe had seen her afraid of the dark. The pines came down the hill like a crowd that had stopped to listen, and beyond them the ridge lay flat against the sky. She climbed with a tin cup of cold tea and a sack of oatcakes, because the Haddow boy had not come home from the high pasture.

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He was sitting on a stone at the tree line with his knees pulled up under his chin, the way children sit when they have decided not to cry. "It's too dark," he said, before she had asked. "The trees have gone all the way up." She sat beside him and gave him the cup. Overhead the stars had come out thick and uneven, spilled like salt on slate, and she pointed at them one by one with a crooked finger, naming the ones her mother had named for her: the Plough, the Hunter's belt, and a faint blue one she called Pell, because it had once been a cousin's dog.

"Stars are only old light," she said. "Most of them are dead already, and we're still getting their letters." He laughed at that, which was what she wanted. They stayed until his teeth stopped chattering and a sheep bell sounded somewhere below, thin and certain. He went down ahead of her, running between the trunks with his arms out, and she followed slower, looking up.

At the gate he turned back. "Are you not scared, Mrs Marrow?" She shook her head and told him the trick was simple: you only had to love a thing enough to stop counting its shadows. Then she bolted the gate and climbed back up to keep the lamp lit, though nobody needed it anymore.