Black and grey tattoo of bare trees, a pine and a flock of birds across a forearm, shading softly fading toward the wrist.

Forest and birds on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a forest of bare, leafless trees and a tall pine, with a flock of small birds rising across the upper forearm in the first panel. Solid black areas define the pine and trunks, while stippled dots create a soft fade that dissolves into the skin towards the wrist. The four panels show the same forearm from different angles, with a dark background and mostly neutral lighting.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Forest Tree Bird Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds had trailed the barque for three days before Tomasz admitted to himself that they were not gulls. They were small and dark and flew in the ragged way of starlings over a ploughed field, rising and dropping as if the air were full of thrown stones. Captain Ferreira called them bad luck. The cook called them nothing at all, because the cook would not look up.

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On the fourth morning the wind died and the sea went flat as slate. Tomasz climbed the foremast with the old brass glass wrapped in his shirt. Beyond the grey water a smudge lay along the horizon. It was not cloud, because its base was too straight, and its top rose into points. Pines, he thought, and between them the pale trunks of bare trees, thin as pencil strokes. He had seen a shape like that once in a print in a Lisbon shop, a wood standing in mist with nothing holding it up.

He came down with the news folded inside his mouth. Ferreira took the glass and studied the smudge for a long time. "Birds go to land to nest or to die," he said. "Which do you want?" Tomasz said he did not know. The flock broke from the rigging all at once and turned, dark against the paling sky, and streamed toward the trees.

By dusk the land had thickened into a shore of black trunks, and the fog over the water thinned where the branches met the sand. The ship came about after the birds. Tomasz stood at the rail and watched the last of them drop into the wood, and he kept watching long after the shore had gone dark, the way a man keeps watching a door that has closed.