Black and grey pine tree silhouettes forming a forest treeline on a lower leg, fading into dotwork shading towards the ankle.

Pine forest treeline on lower leg

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Three views of a lower leg show a row of solid black pine tree silhouettes of varying heights along the upper part of the tattoo. Below the trees, the black ink softens into a gradient of fine stippled dots that fades out just above the ankle. The image is entirely black and grey, set against a dark background with the leg filling most of each panel.

Blackwork Dotwork Calf Pine tree Forest Silhouette Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Thorne had kept the count since the spring her husband went up the hill with the saw and didn't come down for supper. Forty-one pines stood along the ridge above Kettle Burn, and she knew each one by its crooked top, the way a mother knows a row of children at the school gate.

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The men from the estate came in March with their measuring chains and their papers, talking about the timber price and the railway sleepers they meant to cut. Ada gave them tea in the good cups and let them walk the ridge. When they asked her to sign for the lower slope, she said the trees were rooted deeper than their paper, and they laughed, kindly enough, and left her the high pines because the frost had made them hard to reach.

Through the summer the mist came up off the burn every evening and swallowed the bottom of the wood, so the trunks dissolved into grey and only the crowns stayed sharp against the sky. Ada sat on the step with her knitting and watched the dark fade downward, soft as breath on a window, until the ground itself belonged to the mist and she could not tell where the forest ended.

In October she climbed up with a lantern and counted again. Forty-one. Then she counted the ones the mist had buried, and found she still knew how many there were, the way you know a name in the dark. She said the number aloud to the hillside, and for once the hillside said nothing back.