Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with birds taking flight above a dark forest, on the forearm of a raised hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with thin branches rises from a dark forest silhouette that fills the lower part of the forearm. A flock of black birds in flight spreads up and across the upper area of the design. The work is black ink with soft grey shading in the forest, set against pale skin and a textured carpet.

Forearm Tree Bird Forest Silhouette Branches

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the top one's loose, and sit where the stove can reach you. No, not that chair, it wobbles and my knee is no better for it. There. Now. You want the one about the ash at the bottom of Hollin Field, the one that wouldn't leaf, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the wind in the chimney doing the second voice.

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Her name was Nell Corran, and she kept the flock on the hill farm the winter the snow came in October and stayed past March. Every morning she counted the rooks off the barn roof, and every morning there were fewer, because the hard weather takes what it likes. The ash stood at the edge of the wood, bare as a pitchfork, and folk said it had died in the great frost of forty-one and simply forgotten to fall.

One morning in February she found the rooks all lifting at once from its branches, a black cloud peeling off the wood and wheeling over the fold. She stood in the yard with the bucket in her hand and watched them climb until they were specks against the grey. She said, out loud, to nobody, "Go on then. Take the lot of it with you." They never came back to the ash, but the spring after, the field below it greened first of anywhere on the farm.

That is the whole of it, and you will want to make something of it. I can see you reaching for a moral like a biscuit from the tin. Don't. The tree stood where it stood, the birds went where birds go, and Nell lived to ninety and never once told anyone why she kept a crow's feather pinned inside her hat.