Black and grey dotwork mountain and forest scene in a diamond shape with a red dotwork moon above, on a calf.

Red moon and mountain diamond on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A diamond-shaped panel holds a black linework and dotwork scene of a rocky mountain peak, layered ridges, a lake and pine trees, with small stars in the sky above the peak. Above it sits a red dotwork moon with fine stippled craters and a black arrow-like symbol at its top, and a thin black arrow points down from the base of the diamond. The mountain panel is black and grey, while the moon is the only colour, so the piece is mixed.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Moon Mountain Forest Tree Lake Star Diamond Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke had been sitting in the valley for nine days when Ada Marr climbed the last switchback to the lookout hut, carrying the logbook and a tin of cold tea. Below her the lake lay flat as a dropped plate, and the pines along its shore had gone grey at the tips. She wrote the date in the margin and then, because the wind had dropped, sat on the step to wait for the moon.

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It came up red. Her grandfather had promised it would, the summer the forest burned on the far ridge, and she had thought he was making it up the way he made up everything after the second bottle. But there it was, low over the notch, the colour of a coal held to the face of a stone. Its craters showed as tiny stipples, as if someone had pricked the light out of it with a needle. She counted the stars that kept appearing above the peak where the smoke thinned, and wrote down eleven.

At midnight the radio crackled with the valley station asking for a reading. She gave it: wind south-west, visibility poor, moon red, no fire on the eastern face. Then she heard herself add something she had never logged before, that the water below had turned to a mirror with the moon in it and the trees stood in it upside down, and for a minute the mountain looked as if it were holding its own reflection.

The wind came back before dawn and pushed the smoke off the ridge. By first light the moon had gone pale and ordinary. Ada wrote the final reading, then drew a small arrow at the foot of the page pointing down the path toward the lake, the way the crews would walk in, and underlined it twice.