Black and grey dotwork tattoo of bare trees, a pine and a flock of birds fading into stipple near the wrist on a forearm.

Forest and birds on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A four-panel collage of a forearm tattoo showing a forest of bare winter trees and a dark pine on the left, with a flock of birds rising above. The forest is built from fine linework and dense dotwork, which fades to stippled shading towards the wrist. The image is in black and grey against a dark background, and the photos are cropped so no faces are visible.

Dotwork Forearm Forest Tree Pine tree Bird Flock Silhouette Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the starlings lifted off the Hallow Wood at dusk, and Agnes Pell, who kept the sawmill ledger for her brother, counted them the way she counted everything: twice, then once more to be sure. Thirty-one. The year before there had been forty. She wrote the number in pencil beside the date and underlined it, because the men at the mill laughed at her for writing down birds.

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Her brother Tom had felled the pines on the north slope the spring before, a dark stand that had kept the frost off the lower clearing since their grandfather's time. Tom said the wood was tired and needed opening. Agnes said birds did not care for open ground. He had not listened, and by November the bare birches stood like the ribs of something drowned, and the pine was just a black wedge against a pale sky.

On the first hard night she went up alone with a lantern. Snow had begun to fall in those slow flakes that do not melt on the tongue. At the edge of the stumps she found the last pine, untouched, its branches heavy and full, and beneath it a crowd of birds roosting in silence, too many to count, pressed close for warmth. She stood until her fingers ached, then set the lantern down and did not count them at all.

When she came down, Tom was at the kitchen table with the ledger open. He looked at the page, at the pencilled numbers running down the margin like a fence, and turned it over. 'Leave the last one standing,' she said. He nodded, and in the morning he went up with the saw and came back down with it still on his shoulder.