Black and grey tattoo of pine and bare trees with a flock of birds above a Celtic knot band on a calf, shown in four side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest silhouette with birds and Celtic band

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a silhouetted forest with a dark pine on the left, leafless trees rising through the centre and a flock of birds in flight across the upper area. A wide band of interlaced Celtic knotwork runs along the bottom of the design. The work is in solid black ink with soft grey shading that fades toward the skin behind the trees, and the image is four photographs of the same tattoo from different angles.

Blackwork Calf Forest Pine tree Bare tree Bird Flock Celtic knot Knotwork Silhouette Tree

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

On Inchmore the trees had gone to the boatbuilders before anyone's grandmother was born, and only one dark pine stood left above the harbour wall. Every dusk the starlings rose out of the bare hedges in a single shaking cloud, and the old women said those were the souls of the wood, flying west to look for where the forest had gone.

Keep reading

Mairead, who mended nets for her father and had no patience for old women, decided to follow them. Her gran had sent her off with a ball of red wool and the rule that she must tie a knot at every bend of the road, so the way home would hold. She walked the shore past the last cottage and the peat cuttings, tying knots on gateposts and fence wire until her fingers were raw and the wool was half gone.

At the edge of the bog the birds came down into a wood. It was not green. The trunks were black and bare, the branches thin as hairs against a sky going pale like a bruise, and between them a single pine leaned like a man listening. The ground was woven over with roots, looped and doubled and braided back on themselves, so that she could not find where one root ended and another began. She understood then that the knots were not hers to tie. Someone had been holding the island together with them for a long time.

She wound the last red length around the pine's trunk and turned for home. The birds went up behind her, and when she reached the harbour wall in the dark the pine there was bending the way it always had, and the starlings were settling along its branches as if they had never left.