Two photographs of watercolour-style northern lights tattoos on an arm: the left has black pine trees inside a circle, the right shows aurora over a dark shoreline with turquoise ice.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Northern lights tattoos with pine trees and ice

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left image shows black silhouetted pine trees inside a black circular outline, set against soft green, yellow and purple washes that suggest an aurora over hills. The right image shows a blue, pink and green aurora above dark water with pale turquoise ice floes along the shoreline, with the colour fading into dark ink at the edges. Both pieces use soft, blended colour with bold dark outlines or shadows, and each sits on the arm against a plain or grassy background.

Forearm Pine tree Mountain Circle Sky Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice had been following us since the Lofoten shelf, pale plates the size of kitchen tables turning slowly in the swell, and Hollis swore they were keeping station like dogs at a gate. Nobody laughed at him any more. We were eleven days out of Tromsø with a hold full of salted cod and a radio that only picked up the Norwegian weather in pieces, and the cook had stopped singing.

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The lights came on the fourth night, when the wind dropped and the sky over the stern went green at the edges. I was on watch with Ada Strand, who was nineteen and had never seen anything but harbour lamps. She stood at the rail with her mouth open while the aurora unrolled over the hills behind the ice, pink then violet, pulling down in curtains that reached the black water. Ada said it looked like someone had dragged a wet brush across the sky and left the strokes to run.

Skipper Brandt came up in his oilskins and did not speak for a long time. Then he told us about his father, who had fished these same banks and once steered by the lights when the compass spun. He said the green meant the pines were near, the ones along the Kvaløya shore, black and thin, and that a man could find his way home by them if he kept the ice on his left. We all looked at the shoreline we could not yet see.

We made harbour two days later with the hold full and the ice gone. Ada still talks about the colours. I think about the floes, how they caught the light and held it a moment longer than the sky did, and how I kept my bearing by the pines the whole way in.