Small black pine tree silhouette tattoo with trailing vertical strokes on a woman's ribs, in a blackwork style.

Pine tree silhouette on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a cluster of pine trees sits on the side of the ribcage, shown as a solid black silhouette with soft, feathered edges. Thin vertical strokes run downward beneath the trees, suggesting drips or falling lines. The image is in black ink only against warm skin, with a white lace fabric held by a hand with orange nail polish framing the composition.

Blackwork Ribs Pine tree Tree Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The rain came in off the hill on Tuesday and it hasn't stopped since. From the kitchen window the wood looks smudged out with a thumb, the four old Scots pines at the top of the Dunard path gone to dark shapes with water running off their needles in long threads. Dad would have called it a proper soaking. He always said the pines could hold a storm better than any of us, and I think that was true right up until the wind took the top off the tallest one in March.

I went up on Thursday with the saw, though Mr Gillies said to leave it for the forestry men. The trunk had split clean, and inside the wound the resin was still coming out, slow and amber, running down the grey bark in lines the rain kept trying to wash away. I stood there a long while. You'd have laughed at me, crying over a tree, but it was the first thing I'd seen since the funeral that looked like it was still doing what it was for.

I've been thinking about you out there in Vancouver, with all those cedars you wrote about, and whether they make you homesick the way these do. I hope they don't. I hope you've found something that stands up on its own.

Mam wants you to ring on Sunday. She says the line is better after the rain. I'm not sure that's how telephones work, but I'm not going to argue with her this week.

Love, Eilidh