Colour tattoo of green and pink northern lights over a dark pine forest, with a constellation of white-dotted lines above, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Northern lights and pine forest on a back

Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a band of green and pink aurora rolling across the skin, with a dark silhouette of pine trees along the lower edge. A constellation is drawn in thin black lines with small white dots for stars, layered over the glowing sky. The soft, blended shading and vivid colour give the piece a painterly, atmospheric look.

Back Constellation Star Pine tree Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Set the kettle on again, Dorrie, and mind the third step, it's loose as a bad tooth. No, sit where I can see you. The aurora doesn't come to the Cape every winter, and when it does it only shows itself to folk who have stopped looking up for the sake of it.

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That was the year Ada Pell's husband went out to the herring boats and didn't come back with the tide. She took the lamp down from the hook and walked the shore road to the fish sheds every night for a month, saying his name at the water like a fool. On the thirty-first night the sky went green over the spruce on the headland, then pink, then a colour there's no word for, rolling in long bands the way wet silk rolls off a bolt. The dogs wouldn't settle. Ada stood in the road with her lamp out and watched the stars shift behind the curtain, and she swore she saw the Hunter bend down and pick up a dropped line of stars and walk on with it.

She followed the lights north along the cliff path until the pines closed in black on either side. At the top there was a clearing, and in it a little boat turned over on the moss with a lantern under its keel, and beside it, sitting on an upturned creel and mending a net with stars in it, was Tom Pell, looking as if he'd only stepped out for tobacco.

He said, you took your time. She said, the sky was in the way. And that, Dorrie, is the whole of the story, because the tide came in at dawn, the sky went grey, and the two of them walked home by the shore road. The lights never came back over that headland again. But if you go up there on a clear night and squint past the trees, you'll see the lines he was mending, still hanging from the sky, waiting for somebody else to find the way home.