Two solid black blackwork tattoos: a tall pine tree silhouette running down a forearm, and a ringed planet with three dots above a larger circle on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree and planets in black ink

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall, tapering pine tree silhouette runs diagonally down the forearm, its branches drawn as ragged black shapes with a thin trunk. Beside it, a stack of solid black circles includes two small dots, a ringed planet and a large plain circle, all filled with flat black ink. The image is in black ink only, with the tattoos shown close up against pale skin.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Ribs Pine tree Tree Planet Saturn Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ailsa Duthie had given up asking the surveyors to leave the old Scots pines on the ridge, so she took a rope and a tin of black paint up to the last tree standing below the observatory hut and began painting the planets on the boulders beside it herself. Her nephew Calum thought it was madness. He held the torch while she worked, and the beam shook every time an owl went over.

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The telescope had been her husband's, bought from a chandler in Inverness with the money from a winter of gutting herring. Walter drew what he saw in a notebook: solid black circles for the moons of Jupiter, a ringed shape for Saturn, and a small dot he swore was Mars on a clear night that nobody else could find. The notebook still sat on the shelf above the eyepiece. Ailsa had never learned to draw anything more difficult than a tree.

On the last night of August the glen cleared and the cold came down hard, and Calum finally put his eye to the brass tube. He said nothing for a long while. Then he said, "They're all still there," and she knew he meant the planets, and possibly Walter too.

She climbed the path with the paint tin rattling against her hip and looked back once. The pine stood black against the stars, its branches thinning toward the top, and the rings on the boulder below it had not yet dried.