Black and grey dotwork armband tattoo on a forearm, with stippled shading fading into a dark treeline-like edge and a small dot above it.

Dotwork band with treeline on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black band wraps around the forearm, with its upper edge filled with fine stippled dots that fade into lighter grey. The lower edge forms a jagged, silhouette-like outline, and a single small dot sits on the upper part of the band. The image is a close, evenly lit photograph against a dark background and a pale wall.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Band Silhouette Dot Stipple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Oda the charcoal burner had been sent up to the ridge by the headman, who wanted the last old pines felled before the thaw. When she reached the top she found a hollow where the trees stood black against a dusk sky, and a small white moon caught low in their branches, as though it had come down to rest and forgotten the way back.

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The moon told her, in the plain way moons speak in such places, that it had lost its path the night the first axe rang out in the valley. It asked only to be carried home. Oda had a coil of goat-hair rope and a clay pot with a lid, so she tied the rope to the pot, coaxed the moon inside, and walked it down the mountain with the lid held shut against her hip. The men at the woodpile laughed and asked her where she had found such a lantern, and she did not answer them.

At the highest stone above the cut ground she set the pot down and lifted the lid. The light rose out like breath on a cold morning and climbed into the sky, slowly, until it hung over the ragged line of the trees. Below it the forest edge lay black and jagged, and the sky above turned grey, then silver, and the first stars the valley had seen in years came out one by one, like the stitches in a patched sleeve.

The headman's axes stayed in their sacks that winter. Oda kept the empty pot on her windowsill, and when the wind came off the ridge she sometimes left the lid a finger's width open. On clear nights, if you stand where the cut trees stop, you can still see the moon hanging just above the pines, as if it is waiting for the valley to finish its sums.