Colour tattoo on a person's upper back showing an oval view of a green valley with a winding path and distant mountains, beside an open round door, framed by black silhouettes of a tower, birds and

Open round door landscape on upper back

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The tattoo shows an oval window or doorway framed in gold, looking onto a green valley with a winding dirt path, scattered trees, flowers and distant mountains under a pale sky. To the right, a round green door stands open, and black silhouettes of a tower, birds, trees and small figures surround the edge of the design. The landscape uses soft colour washes with fine linework, while the silhouettes are solid black ink, and the composition is a single circular arrangement sitting across the shoulder blade.

Back Landscape Door Path Mountain Tree Flower Tower Bird Silhouette Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways across the Saturday market for an hour, and you have stopped pretending the awning keeps anything dry. At the end of row nine, a man called Ferris Odell is wrapping a round green door in bin liners. He tells you it came off a cottage on a hillside above Cheddar, pulled down in the spring, and that the hinges were still warm when he reached them. You decide that is salesman's nonsense. The door is smaller than you expected, its paint blistered at the edges like the skin of a plum, and it has a round pane of old glass set in its centre.

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He wants forty pounds. You offer twenty and he laughs, not unkindly, then turns the door so you can see through the glass. Beyond the rain-spotted pane there is a valley that does not belong anywhere near this car park. A pale dirt path winds past a lone tree and a bank of pink flowers, and far off, lilac mountains rise under a sky the colour of milk. A black bird crosses it, and beyond the hills a thin tower stands like a stroke of ink. Nothing on the glass gets wet.

Ferris says the woman who sold him the lot used to tell him you only had to walk through once, and then the door would remember you. You ask what happens if you never go through. He shrugs and says the market is always wet and the bread stalls close at four. You pay the twenty, then the ten pounds you had in your coat for the bus, and he refuses to take the bin liners back.

You carry it home under your arm, rain dripping from the green paint onto your shoes. In the hallway you lean it against the wall and kneel to look through the glass. The path is still there, and in the dust of the far side someone has left a fresh footprint, small and bare, heading towards the hills. You open the door just a crack, and the air that slips through smells of cut grass and woodsmoke, with nothing of wet cardboard in it at all.