Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hazy landscape with a dark island inside a thin circle with a dotted orbit, on a person's shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stippled landscape in a circle on shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black tattoo on the shoulder blade shows a hazy horizon with a dark, flat-topped landform and soft clouds, all built from stippled dots and light shading. A thin solid circle and a dotted circle overlap around the scene, giving it a geometric frame. The image is black and white, with the tattoo centred against pale skin and a dark clothing strap at the left edge.

Dotwork Fine line Shoulder Landscape Horizon Island Cloud Circle Dot Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the fog lifted at six this morning and for the first time since March I could see Hob's Table lying out past the skerries, flat across the top as if someone had planed it with a carpenter's square. I climbed to the gallery with the brass telescope and counted the gulls sitting on it. Forty-one. Mr Pryce at the mainland station says the old fishermen used to call it the Dinner Plate and would not row within a mile of it after dark, but I have never known a rock that cared what time it was.

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The lamp needs its wick trimmed twice a week now, and the oil is short again because the supply boat came in on the wrong tide. I have been keeping the log in pencil because the ink froze in the bottle. Yesterday I wrote sea flat, visibility good, island clear, and then sat looking at those three words for a long while, wondering whether anyone reading the log in a warm office would understand that clear was the whole of what I wanted.

I took the dotted compass ring from the chart drawer and drew the thing as I saw it, the cloud stacked over the far coast like wet wool. When I held the drawing against the window, the horizon ran straight through the rim of the glass and I thought of you standing at the edge of the Tyne with your hand over your eyes. Then the mist came back and swallowed the island whole, and I wrote nothing at all.

I am keeping the drawing in the log, folded at the page for the sixth. If the boat comes Thursday, bring the good ink and the small brush. I will show you where the island sits, and you can tell me whether it is still there when the glass goes grey. Your loving brother, Tom.