Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a pine forest with birds and a bare branch running along the inner forearm.

Pine forest tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of pine trees in solid black ink runs along the forearm, with varying heights and a soft grey shadow beneath that suggests a reflection or ground line. Small birds sit in the sky on the left, and a bare branch with a perched bird reaches out at the upper right edge of the design. The photograph is black and white, with the arm in sharp focus and blurred long hair in the background.

Blackwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Bird Branch Reflection

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The row of pines had been planted by the mill owner's grandfather to break the wind off the wash-house, and by the time Ruth Calloway was nine they had grown tall enough to lean over the drowned quarry at the bottom of Harrow Lane. Nobody swam there. The water was black and still, and on calm mornings it held the trees upside down, so the village seemed to have two forests, one standing on the hill and one hanging beneath it.

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Her father said the upside-down ones were only the reflection, that light did strange things over deep water. Ruth believed him until the spring lightning took the crown off the tallest pine. It came down into the quarry with a noise like a dropped hymn book, and the next morning the reflection had a ragged gap in it where the top should have been. Old Mrs Pryce, who sold eggs from her gate, said a reflection keeps whatever the tree loses.

A magpie started sitting on the dead branch that the storm had left bare over the water. Ruth took it crusts from the bread bin. She told it about school, and the boy who cheated at sums, and how the mill chimney smoked on Mondays. The bird listened with its head on one side and never once looked down at the water.

The summer she turned twelve, the quarry was drained for a new pipe, and the bottom was full of bicycles and one brown boot. Ruth walked down to the cracked mud on the first wet morning afterwards and found a puddle in the hollow, no bigger than a tea tray, and in it the whole forest stood small and complete, every tree whole again. The magpie dropped off its branch, flew down, and stood at the edge of the puddle, looking at the trees and not at her.