Black blackwork tattoo of a pine forest running up a forearm, with a bird silhouette near the wrist, while the hand holds a wooden watch.

Pine forest tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand holds a black wooden wristwatch with a skeleton dial, set against stacked split logs. Up the inner forearm runs a dense row of black conifer silhouettes, with a bird shape and a sweep of shading near the wrist. The tattoo is in black ink only, with solid fills and dotted texture at the edges of the trees.

Blackwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Bird Conifer Watch Log

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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

Sit nearer the stove, the cold comes off the water like it's owed money. Take the stool with the three good legs. Right. My grandmother's brother ran timber down the Sillow on a barge called the Wrenna, forty logs lashed in a raft behind her, every one cut from the north slopes where the pines stand so close the light comes down green.

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The pines were what people remembered. He used to say that when the raft swung round the bend at Dunmere, the whole bank seemed to be walking down to meet the water, black and tall, and a single crow sat on the topmost log watching him like it had paid for the view. He kept a pocket watch with a glass back, so you could see the little wheels turning. A clockmaker's widow gave it to him on the condition he wound it every dawn, and he did, for eleven years.

Then the frost floods came. The lashings parted a little after three in the morning. He always swore the watch read fourteen minutes past when the first log struck the pier, and that he never wound it again, because a stopped watch is honest about when a thing happened. Forty logs went out to sea that night. The crow went with them, or so the men claimed.

Pass me the kettle. The stove's dying and the river's gone quiet, and the only thing on this barge still keeping time is the drip from the rafters. Mind the third stair going down. It keeps the same hours as that watch, which is to say, not at all.