Three forearms side by side show a loose, painterly tattoo of black pine trees and green and pink watercolour-style washes on the forearm.

Pine trees and green wash on forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three forearms are shown side by side against a dark red background, each carrying part of one continuous design. Black ink forms tall, sketchy pine trees with splattered dots and fine grass-like strokes, while green and pink wash-like bands sweep across the skin. The mix of solid black linework and soft, bleeding colour gives the piece an airy, painted feel.

Forearm Pine tree Tree Forest Grass Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mhairi had been told to mark the Scots pines on the north slope before the rain came, and she had brought a tin of black ink and a brush because her uncle said the marks had to be readable from the road. She stood at the foot of the wood with wet grass bending against her shins. The trees rose out of the mist like pencil strokes someone had started and abandoned, thin at the top, dark where the branches thickened.

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Her uncle's lodge stood below, its windows the colour of weak tea. He kept a box of watercolours from his years in Edinburgh, the cakes of green gone hard as slate, and he had told her once that wash was only ink that had agreed to be less sure of itself. She dipped the brush and pressed a single black spur into the bark of the nearest pine, then flicked a spatter of dots across the bracken, and found her hands were steadier than she had expected.

By dusk she had marked forty trees. Where the rain came, it ran the green out of the slope in long bands toward the burn, and the pink from the heather bled into it until the hillside looked as if someone had wiped a palette across it. She thought the felling men would curse her in the morning. Her uncle, when he came up the track with the lamp, stood in the wet for a long time looking at the wash and said nothing about the trees at all.

"They'll have to cut round these," he said at last, and took the brush from her, and added one thin line of ink to the highest pine, a stroke so light it could have been a bird's wing or a crack in the sky.