Black and grey dotwork pine tree running down the inner forearm of a man wearing a red and black checked shirt, with a thin single line forming the trunk.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine tree silhouette on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall pine tree is tattooed along the forearm, with its crown built from stippled dots that fade into a dark, speckled silhouette towards the top. A single thin, dark line forms the trunk and runs down the length of the arm, with short branch strokes breaking off it. The ink is black and grey against pale skin, and the arm rests against a checked shirt on a dark background.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Pine tree Tree Forest Trunk Branches Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seedling had been in Agnes Rennie's coat pocket since the felling at Glen Tarff, wrapped in a damp page of the parish newsletter and forgotten until the Land Rover hit the rut below the bothy. Dougie drove with one wrist over the wheel and didn't speak. Behind them the last of the old Scots pines lay stacked like matchsticks, sap still bright on the cut rings. Agnes had counted them twice. Two hundred and eleven, the number the estate had given, and not one of them older than her father.

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The ridge above the loch was bare heather and wind, and nothing on it had grown taller than a boot in forty years. Agnes had a spade, a tin of bonemeal and a stake of ash she had cut in February, straight as a plumb line. She drove the stake first. Dougie asked what it was for. "So the tree knows which way is up," she said, and he laughed, then stopped, because she was already on her knees, working the roots free of the paper with her thumbnails.

The planting took the rest of the light. Rain came across the water in grey sheets and Agnes kept her palm flat on the soil until it went cold, the way her mother had taught her to hold a sleeping bird. Dougie tied the leader to the stake with baling twine. Somewhere below, a stag roared once and was answered by nothing.

Years later the ash would rot and the seedling would crown out over it, dark and speckled against the sky. But that evening it was only a thin green thread, and Agnes wrote its position in the back of her notebook: one tree, one line, the ridge facing north. She underlined it twice, the way she had counted the felled ones, so that someone else could find it.