Black and grey blackwork tattoo of pine and bare trees with flying birds on a forearm, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest silhouette on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three views of a forearm tattoo showing a dense forest of tall pine trees and leafless branching trees, with birds flying in the upper area. The solid black linework and fills are crisp, and the base of the design softens into fine stippled shading that fades into the skin. The design is entirely black and grey and is framed by the forearm and wrist.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Pine tree Bare tree Bird Forest Silhouette Landscape

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

Dunmore's charcoal burners had kept the north ridge for three generations, and Ada Keir was the first to walk it alone in January. She carried a sack of salt, a hatchet, and a letter from the mill owner saying her brother was owed wages for a winter he had not lived through. The path ran between pines so tall the sky came down to a thread of grey. Nothing moved but the birds, black specks rising from the bare birches where the wind had taken the last of the leaves.

Keep reading

The mill owner's man, Stephen Varley, had told her the sawyers at Hollin Gap had cut their timber for the railway and gone south with the pay. Ada did not believe him. Tom had written from the gap in October that the birches there leaned toward the water as if listening for something, and that rooks followed him to the hut each evening and waited on the sill until he fed them bread.

At the hut the door hung open on one hinge. Inside, a tin cup sat on the table with a skin of ice across the tea, and a pencil lay beside a sheet of paper covered in tally marks. Under the last row Tom had drawn a single rook with its wings spread wide. Ada counted the marks twice. Forty-one days. Then she heard them coming, not one or two but a whole wheel of birds circling down through the pines toward the clearing.

She stood still and held out the bread she had brought for herself. The rooks landed on the frozen mud at her feet and waited, heads cocked, the way they had waited for Tom. She understood then that he had not gone south at all. He had climbed to the last tree on the ridge and stayed there with the birds, and the birds had kept his count. She broke the loaf and gave it to them, one piece for each day, and the forest closed behind her like a door.