Four-panel photo of a black blackwork tattoo of a forest of tall bare and leafy trees with a white deer in negative space, wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest silhouette with deer on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a dense woodland of tall, bare and leafy trees in solid black ink, with a deer left as unshaded skin near the lower left. The trees fill the upper and middle of the design, and the ground line forms a dark band around the arm. The four panels show the same forearm from different angles, with the ink in black and grey on a light skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The border fence runs straight through the Kielder plantation now, which nobody who planted those spruce in 1958 would have recognised. I walked it on Tuesday with a surveyor from Carlisle called Pryce, who kept checking his phone for a signal that never came. Where the trees thin out near the old sheep gate, there was a hind standing on the far side of the wire, looking at us the way a clerk looks at a form with pages missing.

She didn't move when we did. Pryce wanted to log her as a sighting for the survey, so I stood still and counted her ears while he fumbled with his pencil. Four, then five, if you count the one that stayed hidden behind the trunk. I thought of your sketchbook, the one you filled with blackened trees for the engraving course, drawn so dark that the deer had to be left blank on the page just to show it at all.

At the checkpoint on the Berwick road the officer asked what I'd been doing up here, and I said counting deer. He laughed, stamped my form without looking up, and waved the van through. Maybe that is the whole trick of a border: you say the plain thing and let the paperwork carry the rest.

I'm posting this from the lodge tonight. The stove's lit and the light goes early, so the trees turn to ink against the sky before six. Come up in May. I'll show you the gate, and you can draw her before she goes.

Love, Ellen

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