Full colour realism tattoo of a forest scene with tall trees, a stream and moss across the shoulder and upper arm.

Forest scene tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, showing tall tree trunks rising into a hazy canopy above a stream, rocks and moss. The shading is soft and painterly, with detailed greens, browns and touches of orange and blue. The scene fills the arm from shoulder to elbow, with the foliage and ground details wrapping around the limb.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Forest Tree Rock Landscape River

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobiah Greaves had been counting rings on the fallen stumps for three weeks before he admitted the trees were counting him. The company had sent him up the valley with a clipboard, a brass tape and a letter stamped with a crown, and the instructions were simple: mark what is sound, mark what is rot, and leave the stream alone. Each morning he walked past the grey standing stone in the water, the one the old maps called the Widow, and each morning the mist lay across the trunks like wool left out in the rain.

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The redwoods, as the foreman called them, were older than the castle at the valley mouth and older than the name of the county. Tobiah measured the biggest at forty-one feet around and wrote the figure down, then sat on a root and found he could not write the next one. His sister's last letter sat folded in his breast pocket. She wanted the money from the timber. She wanted a house with a slate roof that did not drip onto the bread.

On the ninth day the stream rose after a night of rain, and he waded out to the Widow to check the stone for a survey mark. Moss gave under his boots. He found no mark, only a hollow worn into the rock where water had pooled, and a single orange leaf caught in it, perfectly dry. He pressed the leaf into his notebook. For a moment the mist lifted and he saw the whole valley at once, the canopy closing overhead like a hand.

When his report went down to the office, it said the valley held four hundred and six trees fit for felling and one that was not to be marked. Tobiah signed it, walked down to the road without looking back, and left his tape coiled on the Widow's shoulder, where the stream could have it.