Black and grey dotwork tattoo of birch tree trunks inside a circle on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birch trunks in a circle on a lower leg

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A circular design shows several birch tree trunks standing side by side, with pale bark marked by dark dots and knots. The background inside the circle is built from dense stippled dots that fade toward the edges. The image is black and grey, with the trunks left as bare skin tones against the shaded background, and the design fills the frame centrally.

Dotwork Botanical Calf Tree Circle

Find an artist for this

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

The winter the river froze to the bottom, Mairi's father cut birch poles from the wood below the top field and carried them home on his back, three at a time, because the cart wheel had cracked on the stones. He stacked them against the byre wall where the frost couldn't reach the bark, and he told her that a birch would sooner give up its sap than its pale skin, and that was how you knew a good one.

Keep reading

She was nine and did not believe him. Every evening she went out with the lantern and pressed her thumbnail into the knots and counted the dark eyes in the bark, the way her grandmother had taught her to count stitches. Forty-one on the tallest pole. Her father said the spots were where the tree had kept its old branches and forgotten them, and that a birch remembered every year it had lived, which was why the trunks looked so crowded with stories.

In February the wolves came down off the hill and took the ewes from the north fold, and her father went out with the gun and came back quiet. The next morning Mairi walked to the wood alone with a bread knife and cut a single slim sapling she had marked in autumn. She trimmed it, scraped one long strip of bark, and wrapped it round the handle of her father's lantern so that the light fell through the holes like coins on snow. He said nothing. He hung it on the byre hook and left it burning until spring.