Two realistic tattoos: a black and grey face merged with a city skyline on an upper arm, and a colour bird silhouette with a forest scene on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cityscape portrait and bird forest tattoos on arms

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The left photo shows a black and grey realistic tattoo on an upper arm, where a woman's face blends into a city skyline with barbed wire above and bold lettering below. The right photo shows a colour tattoo on a forearm, with a bird silhouette filled by a misty forest, a small lone figure and a red-orange glow at the base. Both pieces use soft shading and fine detail, and each is framed as a close, cropped view of the limb.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Face City skyline Bird Forest Silhouette Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Skerra, the last island before the cold water, the old people said the crow had eaten the wood. Nobody alive had seen a tree on the north side, only the grey stumps of them sunk in the peat. Mairi Gunn was sent across the sound in March with a bag of salt and her uncle's tin whistle, because her mother said a girl who could not sit still was better off walking.

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On the third evening she came to a shore where the gulls stood in rows like fence posts. A woman was burning driftwood in a ring of stones. She did not look up. 'You want the forest back,' she said. 'Everyone does. Give me the thing you can spare and the bird will open its wings.' Mairi had nothing she could spare that she could find, so she offered the whistle. The woman laughed and took it anyway.

The bird rose out of the sea that night, black as a church door, and its belly was full of trees. Mairi walked into it. Inside there were birches, a thin rain, and a single man standing in a clearing, though when she reached him he was only a shape the size of her thumb. The fire at the base of the bird glowed red, and every step she took stirred the smoke into hair.

She came out on the north shore at dawn with a tune still stuck in her teeth, and the old stumps had leaves. Nobody asked where she had been. The woman was gone, and in the sand lay a feather as long as an oar, with a small dark figure walking away from it. Each spring after, the island's children were told to stand very still when a gull stood on one leg and looked at them, in case it was keeping count.