Black and grey tattoo of pine tree silhouettes on a forearm that fades into dotwork stippling towards the wrist, shown in two side-by-side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine forest fading to dotwork on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo on the forearm shows a row of dark pine tree silhouettes at the top, with a solid black band beneath them. Below that, the design dissolves into fine dots that grow denser towards the top and thin out near the wrist, creating a soft gradient. The image is greyscale, with a gloved hand holding the wrist and a wooden floor and sneaker in the background, shown in two side-by-side views.

Dotwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Silhouette Dot Stippling Gradient Wrist Hand

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

The forest ran up the valley behind St Oswin's like a dark wall, and every autumn Brother Tobias sent me up it with the mule to fetch what the cellarer called dead wood. I did not care whether the wood was dead. I cared that the pines stopped at the scree line, where the path bent and the light went thin and grey, and that beyond them the hillside faded into stone and speckled lichen.

Keep reading

Tobias was the house's illuminator. A splinter of gold leaf had taken the sight from one eye, and the other had gone soft at the edges, so he worked with a steel pin dipped in ink, pricking the vellum in dots no bigger than poppy seeds. "Shade is only many small things agreeing," he told me. He wanted a psalter border that went from solid black at the top to nothing at its foot, and brushing would never give him that. He needed me to hold the lamp steady while he pricked.

In Advent I brought him a pine cone and he laughed, saying the trees were only the first thing a reader sees, and the black band beneath them was the rule that kept the ink from running. Below that, the dots did the rest. He died before the Feast of the Epiphany with the border half finished. I finished it myself that winter, pricking each dot with his pin, and when I reached the bottom I could not tell where the last dot ended and the bare vellum began.