Black bare trees silhouetted against a large red moon, with dark shaded ground fading out at the bottom, tattooed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare trees and red moon on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of tall, leafless trees in solid black linework, rising from a soft black shaded ground at the base of the forearm. A large full moon in red sits behind the branches near the top of the design. The black ink is dense and fades to grey at the bottom, while the moon is filled with flat red, set against pale paper towel in a close, straight-on photograph.

Blackwork Forearm Tree Moon Forest Branches Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They had felled the last of the ash on Scarth Hill the week before the red moon rose, so the pit props came from the valley now, bought in by the cart and stacked wet at the head of the shaft. Ada Pell counted them each morning for the overman, tally in chalk on the lamp-room door, and she never once got the same number twice.

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The trees they had left standing grew along the beck, bare as bones in every season, and the moon sat in their branches each night like a lamp behind red glass. Old Tobias said those were the first men who went under and never came up, and that the moon was only looking for them. Ada said nothing to that. She liked the trees, and she liked that the ground under them was soft black earth where nothing had ever been dug.

When the roof came down at Hollin Pit in February, the rescue men went in from the wrong side and got lost in the old workings. Ada walked up the hill in the dark, counting trunks by the red light, until she came to the line of bare trees and saw that they stood in a straight row over a seam nobody had mapped. She told the men to dig where the trees stood. They found the roof soft there, and behind it, nine men sitting against the coal, tapping their lamps against the rock to say they were still there.

In the morning the moon had gone pale and the frost lay grey on the stacked props. The overman came to the lamp-room door with his chalk and wrote a new number beneath the old ones. Ada looked at it for a while, then took the chalk from him and drew a small tree beside it, the way a child would, and left it there.