Shirtless man with platinum hair and his face hidden by his hands, showing a black blackwork tree-line band on his right forearm and a dark ornamental sleeve on his left arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest band and ornate sleeve on a shirtless man

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man with light platinum hair covers his face with both hands in front of a plain grey wall. His right forearm carries a black band of pine tree silhouettes in blackwork style, and his left arm is covered by a dark ornamental sleeve of swirls and patterns. The image is in black and grey, lit by soft side light that falls across the torso and wall.

Blackwork Forearm Upper arm Tree Forest Sleeve Ornament Swirl Pattern

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

The ewes had been brought down from the top pasture before the first snow, all but the grey one with the torn ear, and on the third morning of the frost Mirren Vale took the lantern and went up under the pines to find her.

Keep reading

The wood stood close on that slope, the trunks black against the white like a row of people who had stopped to listen. Her grandmother had told her to count the trees going in, so that a body could always count their way out again. Mirren counted to forty and lost the thread at a broken stump. At the spring the water had frozen into long curling shapes, whorls and loops that turned over one another like the carvings on the church pew, and there in the hollow under a fallen branch lay the grey ewe, breathing steam.

An old carter sat on the stone beside her, his coat gone green at the seams. He had his hands pressed over his eyes and his shoulders moved as though he were trying not to make a sound. "I have lost the count," he said, without looking up. "Forty-one, forty-two. I cannot get past the one with the scar." Mirren set the lantern on the stone between them. "Then count with me," she said, "from the gate." They went down through the trees together, the ewe walking behind on legs that did not want to bend, and at each trunk the carter's voice grew steadier until at the gate he said the last number aloud, and it was right.

In April the ewe came down with a lamb at her side. On the last pine by the gate someone had cut a small notch into the bark at the height of a man's hand, and beside it a single line. Mirren never learned who had made it, or whether the carter had ever been there at all.