Colour tattoo of a striped teepee beside a campfire, with pine trees, clouds and a crescent moon, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teepee campfire and moon on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A teepee with bands of geometric pattern sits at the centre of a camping scene, with a campfire and stones at its base. Pine trees, stylised clouds and a large crescent moon frame the design, which is outlined in black. Warm orange, yellow and red sit against teal and dark shading, and the design is centred on the upper arm.

Traditional Neo-trad Upper arm Campfire Pine tree Crescent moon Cloud Stone Camping

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father has pitched the tent in the wrong field again, the one that slopes toward the pond, and he is swearing at the guy ropes while the light goes amber over the larch. Nobody else on the campsite bothers with a teepee. It came from a jumble sale in Cinderford for four pounds, the poles are painted with someone else's initials, and the canvas still smells of a previous owner's cigarettes. You don't mind. You like the bands of pattern running round the cone, red then cream then a diamond of ochre, the way they look like stitched ribbons when the wind catches them.

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Fire first, then. He builds it the way his own father taught him, small sticks fanned into a tent of kindling, with two flat stones from the stream set either side like bookends. You carry the matches in your sock because he told you to keep them dry, and you have decided that is the only sensible place for anything. When the flame takes, it climbs fast and yellow, then settles to orange, and you watch the pine trunks behind the tent turn from black to bronze and back again.

Mrs Parry from the caravan up the track comes over with a flask and a look that says she has seen the teepee before and approves of it. She tells you the moon is three nights from full, though to you it is only a bright curl hooked over the treetops. Say it's a crescent, not a sliver, she says, and you do, and she laughs in a way that makes your father go quiet.

Later, when the fire is low, you lie on the sleeping bag inside the cone and look up through the smoke hole at the same moon, thinner now. You decide the teepee is the best thing he has ever bought, because it has a hole in the top for the sky to come in.