Black dotwork tattoo on the outer thigh showing a stylised tree line above a horizon, with a stippled, reflected diamond pattern below and small blue accents.

Stylised trees and diamond pattern on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a row of stylised trees and pine-like shapes sits on a horizon line, with a stippled dotwork pattern beneath it that mirrors the trees. Below the horizon, a vertical column of outlined diamonds and triangles is set among blue dots. The linework is solid black with dense stippled shading, and the blue ink appears only as small accents against the black and grey.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Tree Forest Diamond Triangle Dot Pattern Horizon Reflection

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad said the trees were still down there, all forty of them, standing in the dark where the valley used to be. He had been a boy when they filled the reservoir, and he told it every August as if he had watched the water climb the lane one step at a time. My job was the gauge. Every morning I walked out along the causeway with the brass bucket and the notebook, read the marks on the concrete post, and wrote the number in pencil with the date beside it.

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The post had diamonds cut into its top, one above another, a pattern the surveyors chose in 1958 because, Mr Lowther said, nobody would mistake a diamond for anything else in fog. I used to count them with my thumb while the wind came off the water. Below the surface, where the light turned green and then brown, the old stone walls still ran in neat stepped lines, and in calm weather the reservoir gave them back to the sky as grey dots, a thousand small stipples like rain that had forgotten how to fall.

The summer the level dropped nearly two metres, the tops of the willows came up out of the mud. Dad would not go near them. I did. I rowed out alone on a Tuesday with the notebook buttoned inside my coat, tied the boat to the highest branch, and sat there until the light went gold on the surface and I could see the lane, the chapel roof, and a row of stumps standing exactly where they had always stood, their reflections reaching up to meet them.

I wrote the number down that evening: lowest in forty-one years. Then, underneath, because nobody reads the margins, I drew a diamond, and then another, all the way down the page to the edge.