Black and grey forest tattoo on a forearm, with bare trees, a pine tree and a flock of birds fading into dotwork shading at the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest silhouette and birds on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A four-panel collage of a forearm tattoo showing bare winter trees, a tall pine and a flock of small birds in flight. The trees are rendered in solid black linework and silhouette, and the lower forearm fades into fine stippled dotwork that blends into the skin at the wrist. The palette is entirely black and grey, and the composition runs from the elbow down to the hand with the birds placed in the upper area of the design.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Tree Forest Pine tree Bird Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maren had been counting the rooks off the north shore since the last ferry stopped coming in November, and the number never came out the same twice. Behind her the final stand of pines on Skarra leaned into the wind, black against a sky the colour of wet slate. Her grandfather used to say the trees were older than the chapel and the chapel older than the quarrel with the mainland, though nobody on the island could agree which quarrel he meant.

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The birds rose all at once from the bare birches by the peat cuttings, a flock thrown up like a fistful of ash. Maren wrote the count in the margin of the ledger her father had left her, beneath forty years of tide times. Thirty-one. Yesterday it had been thirty-four. The Eilidh had taken three families off the week before, their bedding knotted into sheets and slung over their shoulders, and the trees had watched them go without a sound.

Each dusk the fog climbed up from the water and ate the lower trunks first, so the forest seemed to stand on nothing at all. She walked the boundary wall with a lamp, and where the stones gave way to mist she stopped and listened. Once she had heard a saw. Once she had heard a child laughing under the pines, which was impossible, because there were no children left on Skarra. She had told no one about either.

On the last evening of the month the birds came down out of the sky in one long dark ribbon and settled into the birches, every one of them, and did not lift again. Maren closed the ledger on thirty-one. She set the lamp on the wall and walked down to the shingle, where the fog had already reached the waterline and the trees behind her were going grey at their roots, one branch at a time.