Blue-grey pine tree silhouettes fading into dotwork shading on a man's forearm, with a gold watch on the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pine trees on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man's forearm carries a tattoo of tall pine trees that fade out toward the wrist. The trees are built from fine linework and stippled shading, with the darkest detail at the top of the arm. The ink reads as a single blue-grey tone against the skin, and the torso and blue trousers sit in the frame behind it.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Pine tree Tree Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pitch-burners came up the mountain road before the frost, carrying their iron pans on mules that complained the whole way. My uncle Demas had cut the first clearing himself, and by the time I was twelve I could tell a pine that would weep good resin from one that would only sulk. You wanted the old ones, the tall ones with bark like cracked clay, and you wanted them standing close so the heat of the stack would not be wasted.

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We worked the high slopes all summer, where the trees grew thick and dark, and every evening the smoke rose straight up above the ridge like a line drawn with a rule. Down the hill the trees thinned into scrub and then into olive, and then there was only the harbour, grey and crowded with hulls waiting to be sealed. The ships needed pitch more than they needed us, and the men who bought it paid in copper and never once looked up at the forest.

The winter Demas fell sick, I took the last load down myself. The carter wanted to leave me at the quay, but I walked the barrels along the shore to the shipwright's yard, where a boy with ink-black fingers counted them twice and nodded at each. I turned to climb back and found the slope above the town gone pale with mist, each trunk fading into it the further down it stood, until the lowest ones were only suggestions of green.

I kept one scrap of bark from the top of Demas's last tree and pressed it into the wax of my tally tablet. Thirty years on, when the new burners ask why the lowest trees on our slope are always the palest, I tell them the mist took them, and I let them think that is the whole story.