Black and grey realism tattoo of the state of Oregon, with a shaded mountain and pine trees inside the outline, photographed on skin.

Oregon state outline with mountain and pines

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an outline of the state of Oregon with a shaded mountain peak rising above a treeline of conifers. A tall single pine stands on the right edge, and the outline is drawn in a heavy, even black line. The mountain and forest use soft grey gradients and fine detail, and the composition fills the outline neatly.

Realism State outline Mountain Pine tree Forest Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The radio crackled at six, and Dell Mercer answered it with a mouthful of cold coffee. Smoke, the dispatcher said, two ridges east of Kettle Shoulder, a quarter acre maybe and climbing. He wrote the bearing on the back of his hand because the logbook was still open at yesterday's weather, and he had learned long ago that a carpenter's pencil was faster than a pen when the fingers were stiff.

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From the cupola he could see most of the state laid out below like a sheet of creased paper: the long bruised shadow of the mountains, the grey fold of the high desert, and the lone pine by the railing that the February wind had bent into a question mark. He sighted the smoke through the brass alidade. Its thin ribbon rose straight for a while, then the upper air pushed it sideways like a hand smoothing a tablecloth. Forty minutes, he judged, before it became a job for a helicopter.

The crew out of Silver Fork reached it by noon. It was an old hemlock snag that someone's campfire had reached through the duff, and by two o'clock the crew chief was radioing that the hot spot was cold and the snag was down. Dell wrote that down, then turned to the blank page at the back of the book, where he kept the things that had nothing to do with the weather.

He drew the outline first, with the notch in the north-west corner and the long straight line along the bottom, then the mountain standing up in the middle with its shoulders shaded in soft pencil. Last came the tall pine on the eastern edge, the one he could see from his bunk. He tore nothing out. Ida would be up in June, and he wanted her to see where he had been looking all summer.