Black and grey pine cone tattoo with fir branch on the inner forearm, shown against a red brick wall.

Pine cone and branch on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pine cone hangs from a thin branch with needle-like fronds spreading across the forearm. The cone is shaded with dotwork and stippling, and the branch and needles are drawn in bold black outlines with hatched shading. The tattoo is black and grey, set against a grey top, a red brick wall and green leaves.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Pine cone Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The cones on the Corran road have started opening, every one of them at once, the way you said they would when the dry weather held. Mrs Adair's boy came up the lane yesterday with a sack of them for the stove, and I told him to leave the lot by the gate because I wanted to see for myself. Each scale had lifted like a hand unclenching. You were always the one who could read weather from a pine, and I was always the one who doubted you.

I took one up to the sill in the back room. By the second evening it had shut again, tight as a fist, and the kitchen smelled of rain though not a drop had fallen. Father would have laughed. He kept a jar of them on that windowsill for forty years and never once admitted which of us had been right about the weather, or about anything else.

The letter from the harbour office came on Tuesday. They want a signature, and they say the boat sails on the tide the day after the post reaches you. I've put it under the cone so it doesn't blow off in the draught from the door, and I've been checking it every hour, the way you'd check a glass. The cone stays shut. The paper keeps lifting at one corner, as if it wants to go somewhere without us.