Black and grey dotwork tattoo of bare tree branches fading into the skin on a forearm, with a wooden skeleton watch worn on the wrist.

Dotwork tree branches on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a tattoo of bare tree branches built from dense black dots, with the pattern thinning and fading into the skin towards the left. The shading is soft and stippled, and the ink is black and grey throughout. A wooden skeleton watch sits on the wrist, and a misty field with leafless trees forms the background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Tree Branches Watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been counting dots since the frost came down on the Ferry Field. The drainage board wanted every hedgerow on the Holme survey mapped before the men with the grubbing machines arrived in March, and her pen was the only one left in the office that didn't skip on damp paper. She worked from the gate outward, one black dot for each twig she could make out against the sky, pressing harder where the branches crowded and lifting the nib where they gave up.

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Her brother Teddy drove the lorry and said she was wasting daylight. "Nobody reads a tree in dots," he said, stamping his boots on the running board. She didn't look up. The poplars along the dyke had dropped their leaves in October, and the fog had rolled in off the washes so thick that the far trees dissolved halfway up their trunks. The nearest ones she could draw clean. The rest she guessed at, letting the ink thin into grey, the way a branch goes when it is too far off to hold its shape.

By four o'clock the light had gone the colour of weak tea. Teddy had lit the lamp in the cab and was eating a cold pasty with his coat still buttoned. Ada stood at the last tree on the bank, the one the board had marked in red for removal, and counted its branches one by one. There were forty-one she could swear to. She inked them in, and then, because the fog was creeping up the bank towards her, she added a loose scatter of dots where the rest went on into nothing.

When she climbed back into the cab, Teddy asked how many. "Forty-one," she said, and then, "and a few we'll never see." He handed her the thermos. The tree stayed on the map exactly as she had drawn it, faint at the edges. In March the men came with their machines and stopped at the gate, squinting across the field, unsure which of the trees was the one on the plan.