Black and grey blackwork tattoo on a forearm showing a guitar body filled with inverted trees and roots, with the neck fading into a city skyline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Guitar body of trees and roots with skyline neck on a

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A guitar silhouette on the inner forearm is filled with a dense landscape of bare trees above and their roots below, mirrored as if reflected. The neck extends to the right and dissolves into a stippled city skyline with a tall tower. The work uses fine black linework and dotted shading in grey tones, with the lighter skin showing through the gaps between the trees.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Guitar Tree Root Reflection City skyline Tower Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hettie had been steaming ribs since before light, and the workshop smelled of wet oak and hide glue. The wood for the body had come from the strip behind Carrow Mill, where the trees stood bare all winter and their roots showed pale along the lake edge. She had cut the body so the crowns sat on top and the roots hung beneath, then laid the finish so the water would seem to hold a second wood under the first.

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Her brother Col wanted it plain. She ignored him. The neck she carved from a single length of maple that thinned as it ran toward the far side of the valley, where the city lights came on early. When the lacquer went off, the fretboard had narrowed into a skyline, and at its end rose one tall tower, fine as a pin, that she had cut with the smallest chisel she owned.

Col took it south on the first train in October. He told her later that he had played it on the platform at the city station, and that the low strings went out over the tracks and came back up the line from the hills, so that the people waiting heard a wood where there should have been only concrete. A woman with a shopping bag stopped by the ticket barrier and asked him where the trees were.

In December a photograph arrived with no letter. It showed the guitar propped in a flat window above the river, the trees on its body catching a grey light that was not quite the light outside. Hettie turned it over and found Col's pencil on the back: it stays up there, he had written, and the roots keep looking down at us.