Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree with birds flying above misty grass on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and flying birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a leafless tree with a tall trunk and spreading branches, with a flock of birds rising from the upper section of the arm. Fine, layered linework and soft grey shading create a misty background, with dense grass drawn along the bottom edge. The left panel shows the arm in wider view with a raised fist, and the right panel is a close-up of the finished tattoo.

Forearm Tree Bird Grass Branches Forest Mist

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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

Put the bread down, Essa, and stop counting the sparrows on the thatch, for they will not come to your count. You ask why the ash on Cold Ridge stands bare when every other tree in the valley is in leaf? Then hear it the way my mother heard it, with the mist still lying in the hollows and the wet grass soaking your boots.

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There was a girl named Morwen who kept geese on the flats below the ridge. Her father had gone south with the wool carts and never sent word back. Each dusk she drove the geese past a single ash, grey as a ghost, and each dusk she said to it, "Tell me where he is." The tree said nothing, as trees do, but its branches pointed one way, and the mist lay thick in that direction like a held breath.

One autumn a stranger came up the track with a crooked staff and a cloak sewn with rooks' feathers in rows. He asked for a night's shelter, and she gave him the byre and her last heel of barley. In the morning he was gone, and where he had slept lay a pile of black feathers that would not blow away. Morwen tied them to the ash's lowest branch with red thread, and when the wind came up off the marsh they lifted, every one, and went rising into the grey air above the ridge, wheeling and calling until they were lost to sight.

Her father came home the next spring, thin as a rake and grinning, saying he had followed the birds south for a year and they had never once led him wrong. So the ash stays bare, and the birds still rise from it at dusk, and if you find a feather on the path you do not pick it up. You leave it for the next traveller who needs to be found. Now go and feed those geese, Essa, before the mist takes them.