Black blackwork tattoo of a forest with bare trees, pine trees and flying birds on a forearm, shown in four side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest silhouette tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a forest scene in solid black silhouette, with bare branching trees, tall pine trees and several birds in flight. Higher up the arm the linework is fine and open, while the lower section fades into dense black fill with a speckled, dotted edge. The image is a four-panel collage of the same forearm from different angles against a dark background, in black ink only.

Blackwork Forearm Bird Tree Pine tree Forest Silhouette Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Greywater had been tied at Hollin Lock so long that the towpath had worn a groove beside her. Every morning the crows came down off the bare alders across the water and sat in a line along the rail, waiting for the bargewoman's crusts. Old Ada Sprigg fed them and never once asked them for anything back.

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One October a stranger walked the towpath with a sack over his shoulder and a fiddle case under his arm. He stopped by the lock and asked which way the pine wood ran. Ada told him the wood ran on past the weir and into the dark, that the pines there were older than the canal, and that nobody who went in with a fiddle came out with it. He laughed, said he had heard that before, and went anyway.

He did not come back that night, nor the next two. On the fourth evening the crows left the rail all at once, rising in a black wheel above the water, and went over the trees towards the weir. Ada followed them along the bank with a lantern. At the edge of the pines she found the fiddle case standing upright on a stump, its lid open, and the fiddler sitting beside it with his back against a dead oak, asleep or listening.

She did not wake him. She took up the fiddle and sat down beside him and played the tune he had been playing on the towpath, badly, until the birds came down one by one and settled in the branches above them. When the sun rose the wood was only trees again. The man walked back to the barge behind her, and he never again asked which way the pines ran.