Black and grey fine line tattoo of a tangled branch nest enclosing a pine forest and mountains, on the outer thigh.

Branch nest with forest scene on thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A tangled wreath of branches and loose twigs frames a shaded scene of pine trees and distant mountains inside a pale circle. Fine, sketchy linework defines the branches, with stippled and grey-shaded areas in the centre, and small seed-head sprigs trail below the main circle. The tattoo covers the outer thigh and is shown in a close, slightly warm-toned photograph against a dark bag and a wooden floor.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Branches Forest Pine tree Mountain Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You want to know why Aggie Pell never came down off the ridge, and I'll tell you, but fetch the kettle first, because I'm not talking through a dry throat. Every winter she wove a great ring of blackthorn and bramble on the kitchen table, the way her mother had, binding the thorns with horsehair so they'd not tear the hands that carried them. The wind came in and out of that tangle like a visitor who never knocked, and she liked it that way. She said a nest should have draughts in it, or the birds get lazy.

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Through the middle of the ring she'd leave a clear round of sky, and in that round she painted nothing at all, only let the light settle. Her husband, Tom Gaunt, who could not abide a thing he couldn't mend, said it looked like a window with no house behind it. She told him the house was further off than he'd ever walk. He laughed at that, and then he didn't laugh, because the spring after he died she hung the ring on the byre door and the pale circle inside it had filled with pines. Dark, thin, leaning pines, and behind them the grey shoulders of hills that had no business being there on a Cumbrian farm.

She went up to them in April with a sack of thistle heads and dandelion clocks, and the neighbours watched her climb until the ridge swallowed her. Next morning the byre door stood open and the ring lay on the flags with a few seed heads stuck in its thorns. I went up there myself, years later, with my boots full of doubt. I found nothing but heather and one fat thistledown drifting over the wall, trailing a thread no thicker than a hair. So when the wind's up and the seeds go sailing past your gate, don't chase them. They're only going home to the hills, same as she did.