Black and grey tattoo of a pine forest with roots along the forearm, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black pine forest band on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A band of tall pine trees in solid black ink wraps around the forearm, with the tree silhouettes rising from a dense black base. Thin black root lines hang beneath the forest edge, with some root tendrils reaching down the skin. The ink is entirely black and grey, with the skin tone and a dark fabric in the background framing the forearm.

Blackwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carters of Harrowmere stopped taking the north road the spring the pines came down to the river. You did not stop. Your mother had kept the toll-house at the Greywood gate for thirty years, and the keys hung on your belt now, heavy as a church bell, and nobody else in the kingdom of Auldmere would go up to the forest to ask it for a debt.

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On the third night a boy from the mill came running with his boots full of mud and told you the well in the square had sucked dry. You followed the water's path down the lane to the forest edge. There, where the trunks stood thick as a rampart, the bank had split open, and roots as black as ink hung out of the earth, dripping, some of them reaching down toward the town like fingers feeling for a latch.

You drew your knife, because that is what the wardens had always done, and cut the nearest root. It shrieked the way green wood shrieks in a fire, and the trees along the ridge leaned inward until their tips met over the lane. The old toll ledger said the pines had once been a sworn oath, given to the valley and broken by a king who sold their timber to the shipwrights. You had not believed it. You believed it now.

So you did what your mother would have done. You knelt in the mud, bound the cut end with the red wool from your own cuff, and sang the toll-rhyme under your breath until the trees drew back to their ridge. By morning the well ran clear. Some nights, if you walk past the gate, you can still see the red thread hanging from the root, and the pines, which never move, seem to lean a little toward the lamp in your window.