Black and grey Japanese-style cloud tattoo with dotwork wisps on a forearm, with the arm bent at the elbow and a grey t-shirt sleeve behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cloud motif on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black cloud motif with white outlined swirls sits on the forearm and wraps toward the elbow, with trailing wisps shaded in dotwork at each end. The solid black fills contrast with the thin white linework and the pale skin, and the plain dark background keeps focus on the tattoo.

Japanese Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Cloud Swirl Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cloud had settled in the west tower of Carrow Keep three evenings running, and nobody in the village below would climb up to ask it to leave. Aud Merrin went anyway on the third night, with a heel of bread wrapped in a cloth and her good shawl over her head against the damp. The stair was broken in places, and she had to hold to the wall where the mortar had gone soft, but she reached the top room and found the cloud curled against the arrow slit like a sleeping dog's coat, black at its heart and edged in pale threads that turned and turned on themselves.

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It had no face, but when she spoke it turned toward her the way a dog turns toward a whistle. It said it had been blown off the mountain by a wind that wanted rid of it, and that it had lost the road home between one swirl and the next. It asked her what she carried. Aud said she carried only bread, and the cloud said bread smelled of a hearth where someone was still expected, and that was a heavier thing than any stone in the keep. So she sat on the cold step and told it about her son Piers, who had gone down to the ford after the spring floods and not come back up, and she did not hurry the telling.

When she had finished the bread was gone and the cloud had grown a little thinner at its edges, as if it had drunk her words the way the earth drinks rain. It rose through the slit, unwinding one white thread after another, and went out over the wall toward the mountain. That night rain fell on the valley for the first time since midsummer, soft and steady, and in the morning the grass by the ford was green to the water's edge. Aud went up the stair once more and found a single curl of mist caught on the sill, no bigger than a hand, and she left the shutter open for it.