Colour realism tattoo of northern lights over a dark forest and lake, set inside a grey ornate oval frame with teal stones, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Northern lights in an ornate frame on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

An ornate oval frame in grey shading holds a scene of green, pink and blue aurora above a dark treeline, with its reflection in still water below. Three teal stones sit on the frame's top, sides and base. The aurora is rendered with soft colour gradients, while the frame uses fine grey shading and the landscape is shown against solid black, centred on the forearm.

Realism Neo-trad Forearm Frame Tree Forest Lake Reflection Stone Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ansa had carried the frame over the pass for three days before she thought to look into it. Her brother called it a trader's trinket and said a sheep would fetch more, but the silver was cold and the four teal stones were smooth as sea glass, and their grandmother had told them both never to sell a thing that held light.

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At the saddle the snow gave way to black rock, and a tarn lay flat as a dropped plate. Ansa propped the frame on a boulder and sat with her knees drawn up, too tired to be brave about it. Above the spruce the sky began to move. Green came first, then a bruise of pink that ran from one side of the world to the other, and the stars behind it thinned like breath on glass.

When she looked down, the lake held the whole sky again, and the trees stood on their own tips in the water. The lights below were slower than the lights above, as if they had further to travel. The herders said the aurora was the dead dancing, and that the dead could be asked for favours if you were polite about it. Ansa was not polite. She asked only that her brother stop shouting when she got home, and the lights swung lower, as if they had heard her.

When the sky went grey she wrapped the frame in her coat and started down. Somewhere below the tree line a dog barked and a lamp came on in a window, and she did not look back at the lake. She did not need to. The four stones kept a faint green glow inside her pack all the way to the village, and her brother, when he saw it, said nothing at all.