Black and grey dotwork tattoo of pine trees, birds and a sun inside a triangle with mandala petals, on the inner forearm.

Forest and birds in a triangle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A triangular panel shows a dark pine forest silhouetted against a dotted sun, with a small flock of birds flying above the treeline. The border and lower section are filled with mandala-style petal and leaf patterns. The work uses black ink and grey shading built from stippled dots and fine lines, with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Forest Pine tree Bird Sun Mandala Triangle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the forest was a thing to be looked at from the scriptorium window, not walked into. Three winters he had ground lapis and pumice for the margins of other men's psalters, and three winters the pines beyond the wall had turned from green to black and back again without him once crossing the stream.

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On the feast of Saint Brendan the abbot sent him out with a satchel of goose quills and a cup of dried ink. The gate-keeper, a man missing two fingers, said nothing about the road. It ran north through needles so thick the sky broke into pieces. Anselm stopped where the trees opened and found a clearing with a dead oak in it, its trunk scored by generations of woodcutters' initials. He sat on a root and began to draw the sun the way he had been taught to draw halos: a circle built from a thousand small dots, each one a choice.

Birds came low over the treeline, a loose wedge of them, and he lost count after nine. He drew them as the light moved, dark commas against the pale disc, and then, without deciding to, he began the border, petals curling inward like the leaves on the altar frontal. By dusk his hand ached and the page was a triangle of black and grey.

He walked back with the drawing folded inside his habit. At the gate the abbot was waiting with a lantern and an expression Anselm could not read. He unfolded it. The old man looked a long time, then said only, "You left a bird out," and handed it back, and Anselm saw that the wedge had one more flying in at its tail, a bird he had not drawn, already there in the ink as if it had always been.