Fine line black tattoo of a small mountain range on a forearm, resting on white bedding beside a knitted sweater sleeve.

Small mountain outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single-line tattoo of a mountain range sits on the forearm of a person lying on rumpled white bedding. The linework is thin and even, drawn in a single dark ink with no shading. The muted palette of the photograph, with a beige knit sleeve, a red blanket and white sheets, keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Mountain Mountain range Outline

Find an artist for this

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

The reception tent smelled of wet grass and someone's cigarette, and Maggie found her father behind it with a biro and the back of a seating plan. He was drawing the ridge again. He did it at every wedding, the way other men checked their watches.

Keep reading

"Go on," he said, handing it over. "One line. Don't lift the nib." She had known the trick since she was small: start at the left shoulder of Skiddaw, keep moving, let the peaks arrive as they arrive. Her mother used to say the hills were the only thing in the county that never argued with him.

She drew. The line climbed past the sketch of the cake table, dipped toward the car park where the vicar's Volvo sat, then rose again over Blencathra. Halfway along, her wrist shook and the ink pooled into a small black blot where a summit should have been clean. She stopped. Her father leaned in close enough that she smelled the peppermints he kept in his coat for the children.

"Leave it," he said. "That's where the snow came in." So she kept going, past the blot, down to the paper's edge where the line ran out of the margin. On the reverse, in his square capitals, he had written the name of every peak he had ever walked with her mother. Maggie added the new name underneath in pencil, then passed him the pen.