Black and grey forest tattoo across a forearm, showing bare trees, flying birds, clouds, a moon and a dotted fade at the wrist, shown in four panels.

Forest scene forearm tattoo in black and grey

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A four-panel photograph of a forearm tattoo depicting a forest at dusk, with bare branches, a tall pine, flying birds, soft shaded clouds and a moon in one view. The linework is fine and the trees are built from detailed black strokes, while the clouds and ground use smooth grey shading. The design fades into a stippled dotwork band at the wrist, and the composition wraps around the forearm from the elbow side to the wrist.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Forest Tree Bird Cloud Moon Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird book was still open on the kitchen table when Marian found the envelope tucked inside its spine. Her brother's handwriting, pencilled on the back of a seed packet: Tell the pine I kept my word. She read it twice, then went out in her slippers to the bottom of the garden, where the hedge gave way to the old woodland their father had never let anyone clear.

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The light was going the colour of wet slate. Rooks lifted from the far field in a loose scatter and drifted over the bare birches, and the moon was already sitting low above the crowns like a coin someone had forgotten to pocket. Halfway down the path she passed the stump of the big pine that had come down in the gale the winter Tom left. Someone had planted a new one beside it, a whip no taller than her knee, staked with two lengths of garden cane and a strip of red ribbon gone pale with weather.

She knelt and brushed the leaf litter back from the base. Under it, pressed flat in a biscuit tin lid, was a cairn of river stones and a second seed packet, the same pencil, the same careful capitals. KEEP THE CLOUDS OFF THE GROUND. She laughed, a short sound that startled a blackbird out of the hedge, and sat back on her heels with the dusk coming up through the trees like ink through paper.

By the time she walked back to the house the windows were lit and the birds had all gone to roost. She left the gate open behind her, the way Tom always had, so the wind could find its own way through.