Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a pine forest, birds and a swallow across the upper arm and shoulder, shown in three photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine forest, birds and swallow on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three photographs show a large black tattoo on the upper arm and shoulder, featuring a row of pine trees, a cloud-like form with flying birds, and a swallow on the inner arm in the third panel. The linework uses dense hatching and solid black fills, with fine stippled texture in the sky and mist. The design is entirely black and grey, arranged so the forest rises from the bottom edge and the birds and clouds sweep upward across the shoulder.

Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Pine tree Forest Bird Swallow Cloud Sky Hatching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came down out of the grey at first light, eleven of them, and Nell Ashdown counted them twice before she trusted her eyes. They skimmed the mainyard, dipped under the stays and flew off northward as though they had an appointment to keep. Forty-one days out from Valparaíso, the water casks were down to a hand's depth and the men had stopped whistling at the pumps.

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Captain Harrow would not hear it. "Birds go wherever the wind pushes them, Miss Ashdown," he said from the quarterdeck, not troubling to lower his voice. Nell went up the ratlines anyway, the rope cold and slick under her palms, and hung there while the barque rolled under her. Above the cloud bank something darker lay along the horizon, ragged at the crest like the teeth of a comb. The wind changed and brought with it a smell of resin and wet bark. Her father had built boats on the fjord at Hellesund and used to say that a swallow never strayed more than a day's sail from a shore with pines on it.

She climbed down, fetched the old chart from the binnacle drawer and laid the dividers on it with fingers that would not keep still. The numbers said the coast was two days off, maybe three, and the numbers had been wrong before. Still, when she went aft and took the wheel from Pim, who was too young to argue, she put the bow to the north and kept it there.

By noon the cloud had split like a torn sail, and the dark line became a row of spires standing in the mist, each one sharp as a pen stroke. The swallows wheeled over the bowsprit, climbed into the white and were gone. Nell watched the place where they had vanished until the lookout shouted, and then she eased the wheel a spoke to starboard, towards the trees.