Black and grey realism tattoo of a birch forest covering the side of a torso, shown on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birch forest scene on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a misty forest of tall birch trees with pale trunks and dark branches, with a faint horizon behind them. It uses soft shading and fine detail in the bark and foliage, with smooth gradients from deep black to light grey. The design runs vertically down the side of the torso and fades into the skin at its edges, and the blurred background is an indoor room.

Realism Ribs Tree Forest Landscape Mist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and mind the rope. You want the birches, do you? Then you'll have the whole of it, the way my father gave it to me on the Lerwick run, when the fog sat on the water like wet wool and nobody could see the bow. We had been three weeks out of Bergen with salt cod and a hold full of rope, and the mate had lost the stars two nights running.

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On the third morning the mist parted and there was a shore we had no chart for. Pale trunks stood up out of it, hundreds of them, thin as spars and white as bleached bone, with dark branches hung over them like rigging nobody had bothered to finish. Between the trunks the grey went on forever, and the trees seemed to step back each time the lookout blinked. My father swore the wood walked. He swore he heard a bell from somewhere inside it, though no bell was ever found.

They lowered the jolly boat and rowed in with a lantern, and came back two hours later with nothing but birch bark in their pockets, curled and papery, and one man who would not stop counting his fingers. Nobody spoke of it after that. The captain burned the bark in the galley stove, and the smoke smelled of cold water and something sweet, like a church after rain.

So when you ask me whether the wood is real, lad, I tell you what he told me. Some places only keep their shape while somebody remembers them. Now pass the rum, and keep your eyes on the horizon, where the grey is thinnest.