Black blackwork tattoo of silhouetted trees and ferns inside a circle on the inner forearm.

Black forest silhouette on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black design sits inside a circle on the forearm, showing tall silhouetted trees with fragmented, cracked-looking trunks and branches. Ferns and leafy plants grow along the base and right side of the circle. The work is made of bold black fills and fine negative-space lines, with no colour, and the design sits centred on the arm against a plain background.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Tree Forest Fern Leaves Plant Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday and by the third night the lane to Hollin Cross had gone under, so when the knock came at the back door you knew nobody was coming up the road by choice. Mrs Pargeter told you to leave the bolt alone. You drew it anyway, because the man on the step held a lantern with a cracked horn and his dog would not stop shaking.

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He gave his name as Corran and asked for the room over the stables, the one whose window looks straight into the birches behind the inn. You said it was damp. He said he had slept in worse. Over supper he watched the glass and said little, only that trees in a hard frost do not fall so much as split, the sap freezing inside them until the trunk gives with a crack like a rifle. 'Listen for it tonight,' he said. 'They keep time.'

You listened. Around two the cracks came, one after another up the slope, and you lay under the blankets counting them the way your father taught you to count between thunder and lightning. Near dawn you went down with a candle. The stable room was empty, the bed made tight, the window open a finger's width onto the wood. On the sill lay a single fern frond, frozen flat and grey as slate, its leaflets set out along the edge like the rungs of a ladder.

Outside, the birches stood in their ring, some whole and tall, others torn at the height of a man's shoulder, and at their feet the bracken lay sheltered under white. Tracks led off through the drifts and stopped at the first split trunk. You closed the window and kept the frond in your apron pocket. When Mrs Pargeter asked where the guest had gone, you said the road would open by noon. You did not tell her the cracks had stopped at four, one by one, as if someone had finished counting.