Black ink tattoo of a bare tree, flying birds and a silhouetted forest on a forearm, with the hand raised open above it.

Bare tree and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a leafless tree with thin branches rising from a dense silhouetted treeline, with a flock of birds scattered up the forearm toward the wrist. The linework is fine and the forest at the base is built from softer, shaded black masses. The image uses only black ink and grey tones, set against a pale carpet with the arm held up.

Forearm Tree Bird Forest Branches Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis said the birds would come back once the sawmen had gone, and for two winters nobody argued with her, because she was the only one in Scarrow who still kept hens and knew a rook from a jackdaw by the sound of it. The men had cleared the ridge above the mill in a fortnight. Every oak, every birch, the alders by the beck. What they left was one ash, too crooked to fetch a price, standing alone with its branches bare as a coat rack.

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Every dusk after that I climbed the ash with a flour sack and counted what came in. Starlings first, a loose smoke over the mill roof, then the jackdaws, then a few stragglers that looked lost. Mrs Hollis wanted a number. She said a count was how you knew whether a thing was mending or only dying slower. Below the ridge the old wood stood black and wet, holly and thorn grown so thick a fox would think twice, and each evening the birds dropped into it like coins into a well.

On the last Tuesday of February the count went wrong. I had forty-one when I should have had twelve, and they kept coming, lifting off the wood in a column that bent and folded and bent again. The ash groaned under them. From the top I could see the rusted saw the sawmen had left in the mud at the foot of the trunk, its teeth gone orange, and a bird sitting on its handle, perfectly calm, as if it were waiting for someone to fetch it.

I came down and told Mrs Hollis forty-one. She put the kettle on and didn't ask what I meant. Next morning the saw was gone and somebody had hung a cracked bell from the ash's lowest branch. We never found out who. The birds nested in its crown that spring, and I stopped counting.