Two side-by-side photographs of people seen from behind, each with a black and grey tattoo across the upper back: a row of pine trees on the left and a mountain range on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine forest and mountain range tattoos on two backs

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand shirtless with their backs to the camera against a plain grey backdrop, and their faces are not shown. The left tattoo is a dense row of pine tree silhouettes shaded in black and grey across the upper back, while the right tattoo is a mountain range drawn with fine hatched linework and soft shading. Both images are composed in matching framing, which lets the two designs be compared directly.

Back Pine tree Forest Mountain Mountain range Tree

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, because I shan't tell this twice. You want to know why Brother Anselm stopped speaking to the mountain. Well, the mountain never spoke to him either, so it was only fair.

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He came up the valley road in the autumn of the great snow with a mule, a sack of salt and a letter for the abbot that nobody ever read. The abbot was dead by then. His successor, a thin man called Osric who counted the candles twice each night, set Anselm to work in the pine wood below the chapel. Every morning the brothers went down among the trees with saws and came back up with the cold in their hands. Every evening Anselm walked to the edge of the wood and looked at the peaks beyond, grey as old knives, and said nothing at all.

Then one March a wall of cloud rolled in and the eastern ridge vanished for three days. When the sky cleared, the ridge had come back changed, with a new notch cut between two peaks as though someone had dragged a thumb through a drawing. Anselm sat on a stump and copied it onto the back of a spoiled psalter page with a charred stick. He drew each pine as a single stroke, then went back and hatched the shadows until the paper went dark.

Osric found the page and put it on the fire. Anselm let him. In the morning Anselm was gone, and so was the mule, and the ridge stood there looking perfectly ordinary, as if it had never changed for anyone. Some say the pines on the lower slope still grow in the shape of his drawing, and that if you climb up at dusk you can find the notch where he set his thumb. I have never gone to look. I can see him well enough from here, a small dark mark walking down the far side with the salt on its back.