Black and grey blackwork tattoo of pine trees on a forearm, fading into dots towards the wrist, shown in two photos.

Pine forest sleeve on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm covered in silhouetted pine trees of varying heights, with dense solid black shapes at the top that thin into the wrist. The fine dotted shading at the lower edge softens the transition to bare skin. The two side-by-side photos show the palm-up and side views of the same arm against a plain light background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Tree Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the night the pines came down the hill to the infirmary, the night porter Tobias Greave was pushing a trolley of linen past the lift when he heard them before he saw them. Pines do not walk, his mother had told him, but the stand behind the car park had crept closer every winter since the reservoir was drained, and by February the tallest tops were level with the second-floor windows.

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The night sister, Edith Quayle, did not look up from the drug cupboard. She said the trees came for anyone who forgot the way back to the ward at three in the morning, and that the only cure was to walk the corridor with your head tipped back, counting the ceiling tiles as if they were branches. Tobias did not believe her. He believed in the lift, the squeak of the floor wax, and the forty-two steps from the stores to the sluice.

At ten past three a boy from the burns unit wandered toward the fire door in his socks, eyes fixed on nothing. Tobias set down the linen, took the boy's hand, and said, plain as a shop sign, look up. The boy lifted his chin. Above them the strip lights threw a dark green canopy of shadow across the ceiling, and the boy began naming the trees out loud, tallest first, until his breathing slowed to the rhythm of the ward clock.

Edith said nothing when the boy was back in bed. In the morning Tobias found a pine cone on the sluice sink, dry as bone and warm from the radiator. He kept it in his coat pocket for the rest of his shifts, and every night after that he walked the corridor with his head back, so the forest would always know where he was.