Black and grey tattoo of pine tree silhouettes fading into stippled dotwork shading on the inner forearm, with a silver crescent moon bracelet at the wrist.

Pine treeline fading into dotwork on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of conifer silhouettes, the tallest in the centre, rises from a band of black ink on the inner forearm. The lower edge of the treeline dissolves into fine stippled dots that look like a reflection or mist. The image is black and white, with a plain pale background and a silver crescent bracelet visible near the wrist.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Pine tree Forest Conifer Mist Reflection

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass closed on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the Hallam Inn had eleven guests and one good cask of perry left. Papa said the snow would stop when it was ready and not a minute before, so I kept the kettle going and counted the pines from the kitchen window, the way you count sheep you do not own.

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There were eleven trees on the ridge that I could name. The tallest had a bent leader like a shepherd's crook, and I called it the Vicar. On the third night a man in a grey greatcoat asked for a room facing the slope and paid in coins so old the king's face had worn smooth. He went out before dawn with a lantern. When I looked again the light was below the treeline, sinking into the mist where the trunks thinned to ink and then to nothing.

I followed him with Papa's torch. Up close the mist was not mist at all. It was a lake, frozen flat and black, and the pines stood upside down in it, their reflections running down into a depth I could not measure. The man knelt on the ice with his palm pressed to the surface. "They always climb back up," he said, "if someone keeps count."

So I counted. Eleven on the bank and eleven beneath, and at the eleventh tree the reflection shivered and the lantern light rose through the ice like a fish turning over. In the morning the pass was open, the coins were gone from the table, and the Vicar stood on the ridge with a crook I had never noticed before, as if something had hooked it and let go.