Black and grey tattoo of tall pine trees and flying birds on a lower leg, with stippled dotwork ground fading out at the bottom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine trees and birds on a lower leg

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several tall pine trees of varying heights standing in a row, with a small flock of birds flying above them. The trees are rendered with soft, feathered black shading, while the ground below is built from fine stippled dots that fade into the skin. The photo is taken straight on against a pale pavement, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Calf Pine tree Bird Forest Flock Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Bellgate market since before the fishmongers packed up, and Nell had stopped trying to keep the wooden birds dry. She lined them along the trestle in rows, sparrows and wrens and one awkward heron her father had whittled from a broken oar, and let the water bead on their backs like sweat.

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Across the aisle, Mr Okafor was shouting prices for hot chestnuts, and a boy in a yellow cagoule kept asking whether the birds could really fly. Nell gave him the answer her father used to give: only if the tree behind them is tall enough to be worth leaving. Then she pointed at the print pinned behind the till, a row of pines standing on a hillside, where the ground dissolved into a thousand grey specks as if it were made of everything the trees had dropped and never asked for back.

He had drawn that row the winter her mother left, every trunk a different height, so that no two looked like they had agreed to stand still. He had stippled the forest floor one dot at a time, humming, and said that a good floor was one you could not quite find the edge of.

By four o'clock the rain thinned and the stalls began to fold. Nell wrapped the heron in newspaper, then stopped, because a flock of starlings had dropped over the car park, wheeling low above the bus shelter and climbing past the rooftops. She watched them go until the grey swallowed them, then picked up the heron again and carried it home under her coat, still warm from her hands.