Black silhouette tattoo of a bare tree with branches spreading upward and three birds in flight above it, on the inner forearm.

Bare tree and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a leafless tree sits on the skin, with its trunk angling down to the right and branches spreading upwards. Three small birds in flight are placed above and to the left of the crown. The ink is a single dark tone with no shading, set against pale skin and a dark background with a metal chain.

Forearm Tree Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Cross would cut the old elm, though the lord's man came twice with his saw. Everyone knew it had stood bare since the year the wool barges stopped on the Moss, and that the birds which gathered in its branches each autumn would not leave until it had been properly looked at. Mabel Tanner, who kept the ferry, said the tree was only waiting for its birds to remember the way.

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The lord's man came a third time in the thaw. He was young and wore a new coat with brass buttons, and he stood at the water's edge tapping his boot against a post. 'It's a dead tree, Mabel. It's taking up a good field.' She poled the ferry across without answering, and when the boat grounded on his side she said the tree had been dead before her mother was born and the birds had never once minded.

He took the saw up the lane anyway, and Mabel followed at a distance with a basket of eggs. He set the blade to the trunk, and the first bite sent a clatter of wings from the branches. They were not swallows but three small dark birds she had never seen before, and they rose over the hedge and turned in one slow loop above the field.

The man lowered the saw. 'Where are they going?' 'South, same as anything with sense,' Mabel said. 'They only ever leave from that tree. Ask anyone who's tried to keep a bird.' He left the saw in the grass and walked back down to the ferry, and the elm held its arms up to the grey sky, as bare as the day it was planted.