Realistic full-colour forest tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, showing tall trees, a mossy fallen log and a stream.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest and stream upper arm tattoo

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a realistic woodland scene. Tall trunks rise through a misty canopy, while a fallen mossy log, a rocky stream and clusters of moss and bushes sit lower on the arm. Soft shading gives depth, and the palette is mainly greens, yellows and browns with blue-grey tones in the trees.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Forest Tree Log Rock Water

Find an artist for this

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

Ada Renwick had counted the fallen log twice before she believed it was still there. It lay across the beck above Coldharbour Row where the lightning had dropped it years back, furred green along its spine, and the stream had worn a bright path round its rotten end. Her father had said the pit props came from these trees, and that the woods had been written into the colliery's ledgers long before anybody thought to write the village down.

Keep reading

The men of Coldharbour Row were not going to be stopped by a log. The new seam ran under the water, and the owners' surveyor had pegged the wood for felling by Michaelmas. Each morning Ada carried her mother's flask up the track to the bothy, where old Nan Hesketh kept watch over the stream. Nan knew every trunk by its bark and liked to say the trees grew slower than anybody's patience.

On the last Sunday before the saws came, Ada waded out to the log in her boots. The moss gave under her palm like wet wool. In a hollow of the rotten wood, where a wren had built, she found a tin shilling and a folded scrap of paper in a child's careful hand. It read: Do not cut the stream. Somebody had hidden it there decades before. She pushed it back under the moss and climbed out with her skirt soaked to the knee.

On Monday the surveyor's men came with their chalk and their measuring chains. The first trunks groaned and went down, one after another, until the far bank looked like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. The log stayed where it was, and the stream ran clear past its roots as it always had. Ada watched from the bank and thought it might be the only thing in the valley that nobody had ever managed to own.